When it comes down to it, what is a Blog?

Not much more than personal musings, often with links to other websites which in one way or the other serve to reinforce the point one is trying to make.

Some sites aim higher – to become places where intelligent people go to find at a one-stop-shop manifold links to intelligent work of all shapes and sizes.

Such as Edge, which is way too intelligent for me:

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

We make technology, but our technology also makes us. At the online science/culture journal Edge, BB pal John Brockman went deep — very deep — into this concept. Frank Schirrmacher is co-publisher of the national German newspaper FAZ and a very, very big thinker. Schirrmacher has raised public awareness and discussion about some of the most controversial topics in science research today, from genetic engineering to the aging population to the impacts of neuroscience.

A superb and reliable aggregator is Arts & Letters Daily: not too many new links each day, but each one posted with dry humour and a liberal-minded instinct.

Have a look before they disappear down the A&LD page at the superb collections of links to articles and other writing of all shapes and sizes about the 20th anniversary of the end of European Communism and the Fall of the Wall. Such as this interview with Adam Michnik:

With the West struggling to come up with a response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Mr. Michnik cites Ronald Reagan’s approach to Poland as a useful model for President Obama. The day after martial law was imposed in 1981, the U.S. publicly sided with the Polish people against their regime.

"You have to support in a smart way those forces in Iran that aren’t like that crazy president, that Islamo-Maoist Ahmadinejad," he says. "What is important for them is to see in America a friend. In Poland it worked; today there’s no more pro-American country in the world." The violent repression of democratic protestors in Iran since June, he adds, indicates that "the ayatollahs must feel the breath of history on their backs."

But many many others too.

Finally, I have tripped over The Browser, another excellent site pulling together interesting work in a manageable format.

Including this handy link to the expensive watches worn by powerful Russians.

There’s just too much to read, folks.