Personally I do not find many blogrolls and link lists are as helpful as I think they are intended to be. In most cases they have too many links with no indication of how to distinguish them. Moreover, they almost inevitably reward “Aaron’s Aardvark” Blog by being alphabetical.
And of course now I am falling into the same trap, and I am doing so for the 
same reasons everyone else does, viz you want people to know about the good blogs, but there’s just too damn many of them (or not enough, depending on your point of view).
One solution would be to just pick the half dozen creme de la creme in terms of some criteria, be it taste, site focus, quality or information, etc. But then I find that crazy making too because the most informative site is not necessarily the best written, the most current not necessarily the most fun, etc.
Faced with this dilemma a common response seems to be to just keep adding links to the blogroll and “let God sort it out”, as it were. It’s very tempting.
However, it is my habit when given two options I invariably choose both, or a third if that’s not possible (it’s how I roll). In the spirit of the internet at large as articulated by “Social Media in Plain English”
I thought I’d try an experiment.
Specifically I would like to use the “Poll” function to ask you folks to rate blogs on two criteria, “Level” (of knowledge) and Quality. For those who feel inclined to throw in a few sentences of review into a comment about any/all of the blogs I will eventually be copying those into the body of this post.
The plan (there is one apparently) is to have a Blogroll page with the links sorted by Level, each with a link to it’s review should anyone care to check.
Assuming this works I would also like to do a similar series on climate change education/information sites as here again there is a bewildering array out there; which is particularly intimidating to the people most in need of the education.
The choices for each blog are:
- Level: Introductory
- Level: Basic
- Level: Intermediate
- Level: Advanced
- Quality: Average
- Quality: Good
- Quality: Excellent
- Quality: Essential
of which you are asked to choose one from each catagory.
There is also an open choice is yours to insert whatever you think is relevant (eg “quirky”, “fun”, “awesome graphics”). I am also particularly after a pithy phrase that will be helpful on the mouseover text (especially if you are the blog owner).
I imagine it will take some time before a meaningful tally is gathered, but I figure it is worth a shot. The dream is of an annotated, organized guide to resources of information about climate change.
One final note … don’t suggest any more blogs just yet. The call will come in time, but for now I am trying to do this in bite sized chunks.
A Few Things Ill Considered
Alt txt: “Blogging about climate change since January, 2006.”
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Atmoz
Alt txt:
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Brave New Climate
Alt txt: “Earth Systems scientist Barry Brook”
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Climate Change
Alt txt
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Climate Progress
Alt txt “An Insiders View of Climate Science, Politics and Solutions”
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Deltoid
Alt txt “Blogs about areas of science with political implications such as global warming, the relationship between guns and crime and the use of DDT against malaria”
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We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.
Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 59 … still no evidence.
IMAGE CREDITS:
Greenfyre's 
Greenfyre – better to refer to me as an “Earth Systems scientist” (I mostly do modelling with a focus on biosphere-geosphere interactions). And it’s Brook, not Brooks 🙂
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It is definitely tricky to decide what to include in one’s blogroll, especially when one has close personal friends whose blogs are somewhat thin or infrequently updated.
Efforts to rationally categorize what is included make sense, and somewhat reduce the probability of offending those not included, since there would be relatively clear guidelines for selection.
IMHO blogs should be listed by category, starting with ones by (or in some way vetted by) scientists. A further quality rating would certainly be helpful, but is a lot more work. Student blogs (especially of climate science undergrads like Chris Colose) are a bit of a gray area.
I’m not quite sure how to categorize “amateur” efforts like Climaticide Chronicles, which is excellent but reflects an (entirely understandable)incomplete knowledge of the science.
Re Climate Progress, the science presentation is perhaps no more than intermediate (in terms of accessibility) but the policy discussion is quite advanced, so how does one categorize it?
Erratum: “Atmoz”
Mike,
Disappointed to see BraveNewClimate – the anti-renewable propaganda that comes out of it is atrocious. Example: Nuclear Power or Climate Change: Take Your Pick – ‘Renewable energy does not work’ business card to print. Fear-mongering and flat-out nonsense.