My favourite blogs

I just received an email from a reader in response to a recent Links post asking:

I was just wondering what blogs do you have in your favourites list?

First of all, it's worth clarifying that I do in fact have a favourites list. Some people prefer to aggregate the content from their favourite sites into an RSS feed, but I like to get the look and feel of a site as well as the content, because I find there's an awful lot of information on any given site that is not conveyed in the text (photos, fonts, colour palate, layout etc). This comes out of a personal interest in design but also professional curiosity about the state of the art in web design.

I can't find an easy way to count my favourites list, but I have somewhere in the low-hundreds of sites bookmarked under various categories, and I would guess two-thirds are blogs, with the rest being mainly news sites, governments, think tanks and magazines.

Here's a selection of 25 blogs I read a lot; the list is a mix of personal favourites and others I read regularly to do my job:

• Letter from China: by Evan Osnos, China correspondent for the New Yorker.
• Autopia: transport of all varieties.
• China Defense Blog: military technology.
• Daniel Drezner: must-read for a foreign policy blogger.
• East Asia Forum: From the ANU.
• The Dish: Andrew Sullivan is the über-blogger.
• 3 Quarks Daily: whip-smart aggregator blog.
• Information Dissemination: maritime strategy.
• Via Meadia: by Walter Russell Mead, historian and foreign policy commentator.
• Kevin Drum: centre-left US political commentator.
• Naval Open Source Intelligence: aggregates news from the defence world.
• Arms Control Wonk: what it says.
• Think Tank Watch: again, what it says.
• Fistful of Euros: European politics.
• James Fallows: American journalist with The Atlantic.
• Club Troppo: group blog; mainly Australian politics and economics.
• Marginal Revolution: link-rich, ideas-rich economics blog.
• Autoblog Green: I have a strange fascination with electric cars.
• The Strategist: ASPI's blog.
• New Mandala: Southeast Asia.
• The Arabist: Middle East, mostly Egypt.
• The Urbanist: design of cities and spaces is a huge issue in world affairs.
• Stephen Walt: realist.
• SlashFilm: where I find most of my movie trailers.
• Kottke: web paraphernalia.

Image courtesy of Cheezburger.