Blog Finds

Recently NYTimes stopped free access to a lot of good things on their website. If you want to read the columns online you need to subscribe to TimesSelect. Since this stopped my access to the daily dose of opinion on their website... I was forced to look at other places. There is an opinion that too much "opinion" stanchs free thinking. I don't really agree with that. Isn't pretty much everything we read somebody else's opinion? So I set out to find other places where I could have a healthy and nutritious "schmeal". I hadn't warmed up to the idea of regularly following blogs till now. The blog search engines were not (and in my opinion still aren't) as good as they should be in my opinion. But I decided to give blogs a try anyway. So I went around searching for some good reads. I have to say that the so called "blogosphere" is really a tangled mess, a jungle if you will. The probability of finding good blogs (or blogs you may like) is equal or less than that of finding really crappy ones. Inspite of this I came across some really cool finds. Here's a sprinkling... GreenThinkers I think is a cool blog... a bunch of people posting things about green technologies i.e anything that would help you lead a more sustainable lifestyle (from composting toilets to hybrid cars). Some posts are really interesting... e.g the one today about the problem of "pee bombs" on US highways. Fun stuff and educational too. I was trying to find blogs about India or blogs by other desis (an Indian term for another Indian here in the US) like me. I first came across India Uncut by Amit Varma... which I thought was good. On Amit's blog I found this link to Arzan's blog. Arzan, it turns out, has figured out a solution to those nasty "smashits" and "bollywoodnow" popups which neither IE nor Firefox can block on their own. Thanks Arzan! You need to use an extension called Adblock (which works really well) inspite of having an inbuilt popup blocker in Firefox. You can read Arzan's post on how to do it. Thanks to Amit Varma... I found some more cool blogs like this one by Megha and few more like Sepia Mutiny and The Acorn, which I would like to keep track of henceforth. Atanu Dey's blog on Deeshaa is great. I really liked his posts. Do check out a couple of his posts on Tom Friedman's book "The World is Flat" (about outsourcing etc.). I also liked Atanu's essay on India's education system. It makes a lot of sense. I guess it applealed so much because I am a product of that system. The biggest catch of the day was this story by Jean Giorno posted on Atanu's blog... awesome! I realized that I might have just touched the tip of the iceberg. I can't imagine how many more good blogs may be out there. I think I might have finally found an inexhaustible source of "hot air" for my daily consumption and its FREE! Take that! NYT... even if I can afford to cough up 50 bucks a year... I don't think I will ever subscribe to TimeSelect. Technorati Tags: Indian blogs