14 September 2010

'50 Great Blogs'

Over the past week I noticed that a new list of blogs -- 50 Great Blogs to Improve Your Chess Game (Onlinemasters.org) -- has been linked several times from some of my own favorite blogs (listed under my profile on the right). Although many of the 50 blogs have little to do with improvement and several truly great blogs are missing from the list (ChessVibes and Streatham&Brixton are two obvious choices), it's still a good starting point to construct a list of personal favorites. I compared the list against my own favorites and discovered that I was missing about half of them:-

4. The Blogs at MonRoi (*)
5. Chessvine.com (*)
11. Chess Blog For Girls
12. Blogs at Chess.com (*)
13. Chess-Coach.net
15. The Hip-Hop Chess Federation Blog
16. MyChessBlog.com
19. The Week in Chess (*)
23. chessblogger
25. Greenpoint Chess and Go Club (*)
26. About.com: Chess
31. The Chunky Rook
32. CHESSX
33. The Prodigal Pawn
34. ChessCafe.com (*)
36. Getting to 2000
37. ELO2000.com
38. Rolling Pawns
39. Rocky Rook
40. Kenilworth Kibitzer
41. Beginchess.com
44. Rob’s Chess Blog
45. Grandmaster Growl (*)
47. Kindred’s Kaleidoscope
48. Claus Jensen Chess Blog (*)
50. Mark Bluvshtein’s Blog

The numbering is from the original list of '50 Great Blogs'. The blogs I've marked with an asterisk '(*)' are top candidates for my own list. It's not that I don't like the others; I'm just not particularly interested in blogs whose goal is to improve my game. A few of the links carry asterisks (TWIC and ChessCafe) because I didn't realize they had an RSS feed. For that reason alone, I'm glad I did the exercise.

***

Later: Another list was promoted a few months after the first: Top Computer Chess Blogs. Although few of these blogs have anything to do with 'Computer Chess', it would still be a useful exercise to see how many of these blogs are on my own list of favorites. I'll leave that for another time.

5 comments:

Tom Chivers said...

I don't understand why that list has gotten linked to so many times. The website is obviously a junk website used to advertise junk degrees.

millie said...

From all of us at Greenpoint chess club, thanks for mentioning our blog! We've recently gotten two new contributors and our web developer is currently redesigning the site. We are hoping that in the next few weeks it will have a much nicer interface and look more like chessvibes, with a book review section as well as columns for our regular posters.

Mark Weeks said...

Re 'junk website / junk degrees', this is a case where the medium is *not* the message. The message is the list of blogs. Any list of 50 chess blogs is noteworthy, irrespective of the source. - Mark

cludi said...

Have to agree with Mark here although I may be considered biased as one of the mentioned blogs is mine:
You should consider the list a guide to interesting chess sites. Even junk sites may be helpful from time to time.

Regards,
Claus
#48 on the list

psla said...

Yes, I also found that original list. Frankly, I do not much care whether it is a junk list or not. Thanks to that list I found good chess sites and some other people found mine (www.elo2000.com)

Petr

#38 on the list