Concerning the Historie and Nature of Blogs of Note | AZ

[Athuat] AZ

Way back in — one might say — the “D” “A” “Y,” when Blogger was made by Pyra, before Ev forgot how to read, and most people hadn’t heard about these new “web-enabled Internet log pages” (aren’t you glad people stopped calling them that?), there was the Blog of the Week. But it was a pain to keep updating.

So, Ev went and made a new thing, Blogs of Note, and added it to the Blogger homepage. It was,

[j]ust a simple, ongoing, irregularly updated list of blogs I’ve happened to come across and found interesting for one reason or another. This reason need not be substantial. It could be I liked a particular post. It could be the blog seems to have good writing, or good design, or original content or concept, or I just like the name.

Blogs of Note enjoyed a cheerful run on the homepage, showing off the ten most recently noted blogs. Ev chose most of them, with other contributions coming from Jason, Maggie, Olivier, and Anil. Eventually Pyra got bought, and Blogs of Note stayed, with new contributors and an ever-growing pool of awesome Blogger-powered blogs to showcase.

Then, in what was otherwise a grand day for Blogger, the informative and helpful new homepage design kicked Blogs of Note off the home page and onto the Dashboard. Though it still showed off darn nifty blogs (including this one), Blogs of Note sniffled a bit and cried itself to sleep at nights. Why wasn’t it getting the homepage love it deserved?

Blogs of Note gamely noted on. It waited for its moment, which finally came when an attempt to put a Blog Search box on the Blogger homepage went awry and ended up as Explore Blogs, an overly delightfully-animated look into the most interesting, most recent, and most random blogs on Blogger (plus a search box). Finally, Blogs of Note was given back its spotlight and — so as not to look stale and lame — we kicked it up a notch and started updating it more often, showing off a new noteworthy blog every day.
In the past five years, over seven hundred blogs have appeared on Blogs of Note (at least one of them twice!), yet all anyone has ever seen is the most recent ten. What’s up with that?

Today we’re happy to unveil something new: the Blogs of Note blog (meta!). Now you can see all the blogs we’ve ever blog of noted, going all the way back to 2001. This also means that if you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the Blogs of Note Atom feed to get the latest delivered to you every day.

We hope you have fun with this combination slice of blogging history/firehose of hot fresh blogs. As a bonus tip, if you run across a blog that you’d like to check out but that’s not there any more, try running it through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to see if they have a copy.