Observer: most powerful blogs

Nine journalists of Observer wrote a list of the world's 50 most powerful
blogs (from Observer, March 9 2008)

1 The Huffington Post
Huffington Post is a liberal online news site and aggregated blog founded (in 2005) by millionaire Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington (1950) and Kenneth Lerer
2 Boing Boing
Boing Boing was launched in January 2000 and has had an immeasurable influence on the style and idiom of blogging. But hidden among the pictures of steam-powered CD players and Darth Vader tea towels there is a steely, ultra-liberal political agenda: championing the web as a global medium free of state and corporate control
3 Techcrunch
Techcrunch began in 2005 as a blog about dotcom start-ups in Silicon Valley, but has quickly become one of the most influential news websites across the entire technology industry. Founder Michael Arrington had lived through the internet goldrush as a lawyer and entrepreneur before deciding that writing about new companies was more of an opportunity than starting them himself. His site is now ranked the third-most popular blog in the world by search engine Technorati, spawning a mini-empire of websites and conferences as a result. Business Week named Arrington one of the 25 most influential people on the web, and Techcrunch has even scored interviews with Barack Obama and John McCain
4 Kottke
one of the early wave of blogging pioneers, web designer Jason Kottke started keeping track of interesting things on the internet as far back as 1998. The site took off, boosted partly through close links to popular blog-building website Blogger
5 Dooce
Heather B. Armstrong (1975) is an american blogger who writes her personal blog under the pseudonym of Dooce
6 Perezhilton
Mario Armando Lavandeira Jr (1978) blogs at Perez Hilton about gossip items about musicians, actors and celebrities
7 Talking Points Memo
TPM is a centre-left political blog created (in November 2000) and run by Josh Marshall
8 Icanhascheezburger
ICHC (I Can Has Cheezburger?) was created in January 2007 and it shows lolcats (images combining a photograph of an animal with a funny caption in broken english)
9 Beppe Grillo
probably the most famous blog in Italy
10 Gawker
a New York blog of 'snarky' gossip and commentary about the media industry, Gawker was founded in 2002 by journalist Nick Denton
11 The Drudge Report
it's a US-based news aggregation site (blog?) run by Matt Drudge; it became famous worldwide when it was the first to talk about Monica Lewinksy
12 Xu Jinglei
Jinglei is a popular actress in China, who in 2005 began a blog ('I got the joy of expressing myself') which within a few months had garnered 11.5m visits and spurred thousands of other Chinese to blog. In 2006 statisticians at Technorati, having previously not factored China into their calculations, realised Jinglei's blog was the most popular in the world; the blog is in chinese language
13 Treehugger
green consumer blog with a mission to bring a sustainable lifestyle to the masses
14 Microsiervos
founded in 2001, it's a spanish-language blog run by 3 guys in Madrid
15 TMZ
entertainment news, celebrity gossip and Hollywood rumours
16 Engadget
popular blog on gadgets and consumer electronics
17 Marbury
a british commentary on the 2008 US presidential race
18 Chez Pim
Pim grew up in Bangkok and she moved to San Francisco; she travels a lot and she blogs about restaurants, recipes and anything about food
19 Basic Thinking
german-language blog, recently rated the 18th most influential blog in the world by Wikio, Basic Thinking, which has the tag line 'Mein Haus, Mein Himmel, Mein Blog', is run by Robert Basic of Usingen, Germany, who aims 'to boldly blog what no one has blogged before', and recently posted his 10,000th entry
20 The Sartorialist
fashion blog run by Scott Schuman, the blog attracts more than 70,000 readers a day and has been named one of Time's Top 100 Design Influences
21 Students for a Free Tibet
global, grassroots network of students campaigning to free Tibet
22 Jezebel
celebrity, sex and fashion: a blog like a women's magazine
23 Gigazine
japanese-language blog, it's the most popular blog in Japan
24 Girl with a one-track mind
following in the footsteps of Belle de Jour – the anonymous blogger claiming to be a sex worker – the girl with a one track mind started writing in open, explicit terms about her lively sex life in 2004
25 Mashable
created by Peter Cashmore in 2005, it's a is a social-networking news blog, reporting on and reviewing the latest developments, applications and features available in or for MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and other social-networking sites and services
26 Greek tragedy
Stephanie Tara Klein's blog allows her to 'create an online scrapbook of my life, complete with drawings, photos and my daily musings' or, rather, tell tawdry tales of dating nightmares, sexual encounters and bodily dysfunctions
27 Holy Moly
latest celebrity gossip & entertainment news for UK, Hollywood & more
28 Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin, a conservative newspaper columnist and author with one of the most widely read conservative blogs in the US
29 Cranky flier
Brett Snyder is obsessed with airports and airplanes and he gives us all the information we may ever need about planes
30 Go fug yourself
comedy blog about fashion gossip run by Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks
31 Gaping void
Hugh MacLeod is a cartoonist and professional blogger, known for his ideas about how "Web 2.0" affects advertising and marketing
32 DirtyDirtyDancing
pictures from parties in London (is it a blog?)
33 Crooked timber
formed as an internet supergroup, pulling several popular intellectual blogs together, Crooked Timber now has 16 members – largely academics – across the US, Europe, Australia and Asia. The site has built itself a reputation as something of an intellectual powerhouse; a sort of global philosophical thinktank conducted via blog
34 Bean sprouts
combining diary, opinion and green lifestyle tips, Beansprouts is a blog that covers one family's 'search for the good life'. Melanie Rimmer and her family of five live in a 'small ex-council house' with a garden on the edge of farmland in Poynton, Cheshire (UK)
35 The offside
UK-based blog covering football leagues globally
36 Peteite Anglaise
bored at work one day in 2004, expat secretary Catherine Sanderson happened upon the concept of blogging. With a few clicks and an impulse she created her own blog, and quickly gathered fans who followed her life in Paris, the strained relationship with her partner and adventures with her toddler
37 Crooks and liars
founded in 2004 by John Amato, it's a progressive/liberal-leaning political blog
38 Chocolate and zucchini
it's a blog written by Clotilde Dusoulier, a 28-year-old Parisian woman who lives in Montmartre and shares her passion for all things food-related -- thoughts, recipes, musings, cookbook acquisitions, quirky products, nifty tools, restaurant experiences, ideas, and inspirations
39 Samizdata
written by a bunch of anarcho-libertarians, tax rebels, Eurosceptics and Wildean individualists, it has a special niche in the political blogosphere: like a dive bar, on the rational side of the border between fringe opinion and foam-flecked paranoid ranting
40 Andrew Sullivan - The daily dish
Andrew Sullivan (1963) is an english man living in US and he's been blogging since 2000; he supported Bush in 2000, Kerry in 2004 and he's supporting Barack Obama now
41 The f word
contemporary UK feminism
42 Jonny B's private secret diary
growing in popularity since its debut in 2003, Jonny B's diary catalogues the rock and bowls lifestyle of one man in the depths of rural Norfolk
43 Popjustice
founded in May 2000, the most famous blog about pop music
44 Waiter rant
rant isn't quite the right word for this collection of carefully crafted stories from the sharp end of the service industry in a busy New York restaurant. 'The Waiter', as the author is known, has been blogging his experiences with fussy customers and bad tippers since 2004, winning a gong at blogging's biggest awards, the Bloggies, in 2007
45 Hecklerspray
sharply written and often laugh-out-loud funny, Hecklerspray has been called the British alternative to Perez Hilton, but it's different in important ways: the emphasis here is on style and wit, with a stated aim to 'chronicle the ups and downs of all that is populist and niche within the murky world of entertainment'
46 WOW Insider
blog about the World of Warcraft, the role-playing game
47 AngryBlackBitch
Angry Black Bitch, which has the tagline, 'Practising the Fine Art of Bitchitude', is the four-year-old blog of Shark Fu of St Louis, Missouri
48 Style bubble
Susie Bubble lives in London and she blogs about fashion
49 After Ellen
news, reviews & commentary on lesbian and bisexual women in entertainment and the media
50 Copyblogger
Copyblogger was founded in 2006 by Brian Clark, who blogs about copywriting skills