Dvorak's Blogprimer
Understanding and Reading a Blog: a reader's (visitor's) guide.

The Cluetrain Manifesto
The end of business as usual. It is an essay, written collaboratively, with a central argument that consumers are empowered by the interactive web to make smarter purchase decisions, or something like that...

Dan Gillmor's The End of Objectivity (currently version 0.91 as of this writing)
Dan Gillmor tries to make a more honest alternative to the traditional journalistic credo of "objectivity," they are 1)thoroughness, 2)accuracy, 3)fairness and 4)transparency. The basis of his reasoning (more or less) is that no person can ever be truly "objective" eg. neutral and acceptable to all sides of an argument (It makes a lot of sense to me). It is especially evidenced by the various political blogs. What a blogger (read:journalist) can do without sacrificing personal beliefs and integrity is to try to be thorough, accurate, fair, and transparent in grounding his/her argument; as opposed to watering down his/her argument for the sake of political correctnes, taboo, or whatnots.

Rebecca Blood's essays
Rebecca's pocket is one of the first public weblogs, along with JOHO, and some others (I think). Rebecca has gone so far as to become a frequent speaker in several international blogging and web design seminars and simposium. She has even written a book.

Wikipedia on Weblogs
A very comprehensive description of blogs and blogging is included in this article. It also lists other content management systems (which is basically what a blogging system is) which are not limited to making blogs (unlike the ones below). Tools like Zope, Plone, etc.

BrainJar
BrainJar.com: Experiments in Web Programming. Lotsa Good stuffs: Javascript, CSS, XHTML, even ActiveX Action Scripts.

The CSS Zen Garden
Graphic Designers should take CSS seriously. This demo site shows why. The beautiful pages are made purely using XHTML and CSS; no Javascript tricks or plugins necessary. They even load fast (well, at least most of the samples do).

diveintomark
Mark Pilgrim's guide to markup.

Tim Berners-Lee
Creator of HTTP and WWW; NOT the Internet

W3C
the World Wide Web consortium: Leading the Web to Its Full Potential

the Web Design Group
an excellent resource! easy to digest resource for begginer HTML coders

Blogger
"The Spot for your Blog." Also known as BlogSpot. One of the original freeware web-based blogging tools, along with Xanga, Pitas, and some other ones that I haven't even bothered to find. Blogger was the more succesful of them, originally managed by Pyra Labs until sold to Google. Pyra was eventually acquired by Google, too. Blogger is also the most popular free blogging tool (by the number of blogs, based on some survey or other I read somewhere)

Live Journal
One highlight of this tool is that it allows for "friends only" posts, meaning you can mark some of your entry as readable only by some specific group of other LiveJournal users which you have classified as 'friends.' Of course you can also make your LiveJournal public too.

Typepad
If I'm ever gonna pay for blogging services, I guess Typepad will get my money. Unless I wanna rent a domain name and server space while I'm at it, in which case I'd go with either one of the next two.

Movable Type, and Wordpress
These are the big two of the do-it-yourself blog tools. They are basically a collection of php and perl scripts which you install onto your own server. You're gonna have to at least get a basic acquaintance with the term LAMP, though arguably you only need to have a basic understanding of HTTP and FTP, along with basic knowledge of PHP and Perl. In either case MT and WP does not provide 'push button publishing' like the other tools listed above, but in turn offer total controll of your blogs.

Boing Boing
"A directory of Wonderful things." You'd have better luck following its RSS feeds daily; this collective blog creates new posts at an average rate of six per hour. For twenty- four hours a day. And they're all "wonderful things"

Dvorak Uncensored
Tech columnist John C. Dvorak goes off- topic. I always loved his stuffs, I've been reading his columns from since the first time my dad got me a PC Magazine subscription back in junior high; way back from the very early nineties...

Kottke.org
a former professional full-time web designer and graphic designer. Now a full-time professional blogger. Kottke has been featured in Wired, though I've known about him for a while back before then. I think it was from a Boing Boing post featuring his oppinion on the copyrighting of Girl Scout campfire songs (link to specific post coming soon™)

Engadget
One of the two big gadget blogs

Gizmodo
One of the two big gadget blogs

InstaPundit.com
One of the big two US law blogs. Its also one of the first famous blogs, gaining notoriety sometime after 9/11, becoming the first of the 'Warbloggers,' sites which argue in favor for the US's war on terrorism. The site has been referred to by Wired as the blogfather. It gets a lot of hits anyway.

Wil Wheaton dot Net
Get real. Seriously, you don't know Wil?

The Volokh Conspiracy
One of the big two US law blogs. It is left wing to Instapundit's right wing. I think. Yeah well, you US citizens can explain this whole left-right thing better than I can.

Ad Blog
By John Kuraoka aka. Long John Silver (ARRR!!!). An advertising-free weblog covering the world of advertising. Discovered through Shallow Thoughts. Wish he'd make an RSS feed, though...

Andy HoboTraveler
A godawfully-big & messy site of a Hobo (I'll try to dig up a link to a more definitive explanation of the term) travelling the world.

The Becker- Posner Blog
Senator Becker and Judge Posner began their blogging career guest-blogging at Lawrence Lessig's blog. Obviously they got addicted.

blorp
Justin Frankel, creator of WinAmp, Gnutella, and the JesuSonic CruzFX 10000!

Kevin Sites Blog
Kevin Sites (yes that's his name; its not a misspelling of Kevin's site) is a freelance war reporter. His writing is great. I've posted about him before.

lizard_sf's Xanga Site
First got acquainted with him when I stumbled into his home page, mrlizard.com. I was attracted to his talk about 'liberal anarchy.' If I'm not mistaken, Lizard SF is also his legal name. When he stopped actively adding articles to his home page (due to his new hobby of blogging at Xanga) sometime around 2001, I stopped visiting his site. I only recently visited back, and it turns out that he has managed to make some interesting posts on his 'new' blog...

Winds of Change.NET
"Liberty. Discovery. Humanity. Victory."

The Sneeze
"Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions."

JOHO the Blog
one of the first bloggers, and the initiator of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Rebecca's Pocket
She has lots of interesting writings, the first one I read being "The History of Weblogs"

Armed and Dangerous
Eric S. Raymond: hacker, computer language expert, author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Also a gun loving liberal wiccan priest, an OSI founding member and "cyber-culture" sociologist. One of my favorite thing coming from him is his idea for the hacker emblem. He is also known as ESR.

Bruce Perens
an OSI founding member, he had a falling out with ESR shortly after the Netscape Open-Source episode and subsequently left. Also a former Pixar 3D coder, former HP Global Strategist, currently a software consultant who among others initiated the PalmSource project (let me dig around for that link, its around here somewhere...).

Eben Moglen
General counsel, FSF. He began his career at the gentle age of fifteen working for IBM, and upon graduating from high school decided to take up law at Harvard, instead. Note that this site is actually a repository of his papers and essays, instead of a regular blog.

Groklaw
Covering IT court cases in the 'States. Particularly the famous SCO Unix vs. IBM case; which wound up becoming a challenge to the GNU GPL. As a result, SCO is almost bankrupt, of course.

Inside Firefox
Ben Goodger's inside track on Firefox development

RMS blog
Richard Stallman aka. RMS, founder and head of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and Project GNU. I should write much, much more about him. Soon™. But perhaps you can start getting to know him by reading his collected essays, most of which are available at the FSF's philosophy section.

7-Zip
The 7-Zip format is the compression format used by Power Archiver to achive its better-than-zip (meaning smaller copressed-to-original filesize ratio, even better than Rar, GZip, and BZip; though slightly slower) compression. And it's open source (although with some hooks to proprietary Win32 libraries; there are people working on it.

GameCritics.com
"smart reviews for serious gamers" I first encountered this site looking for an alternative to Gamespot. Sure, there's the Adrenaline Vault, IGN, and other game review sites (which I do visit too on occasions), but I like GameCritics in particular due to its more thoughtful reviews, often taking a cultural viewpoint of the reviewed games' content. Its features are also fun to read.

MSDN's Channel 9
Microsoft developers make a Wiki, purportedly inspired by the Cluetrain...

Open Source for Windows
A repository hosted by Sourceforge listing a collection of Free and/or Open Source Software which have been rebuilt or coded from scratch specifically to work under one or several version of "that other operating system" (as if most of the world knows any other, or has ever seen a computer not using it). It obviously lists Firefox and 7-Zip :p and such stallwarts as WinGIMP and Blender 3D.

Spread Firefox
Spread Firefox is a grasroots marketing communication campaign, initiated by the Mozilla foundation, to promote the browser. Interesting to note that the site is powered with software from Civic Space, the same group which organized Howard Dean's presidential camaign blog. A related site is Get Firefox.

Kuro5hin
Also known as K5. "Technology and culture, from the trenches." Some would associate K5 with Slashdot saying that K5's an alternative to it, but increasingly the user contributed articles of K5 has focused more on culture (perhaps arguably cyber culture) and less on specific technology issues.

Slashdot
"News for Nerds, Stuffs that Matters". The original geek discussion site. Many find it a useful repository for news of interest to geeks (I don't claim myself a geek but I do find /. useful too), but some complains that its discussions are a tad too juvenile, one in particular Bruce Perens. As do some regulars of K5.

The Open Source Initiative
Formed 1998, along with the open-sourcing of Netscape Navigator's source, as a marketing campaign for Free Software (Free as in Free Speech, not as in Free Beer), by (controversially) renaming it "Open Source", seeing that (in some oppinion) the term "Free Software" creates too much ambiguity to be understood correctly by the general public.

The Free Software Foundation
"Free as in Freedom". The organisation formed at 1986 by Richard M. Stallman to garner support for his GNU operating system and also to promote Free Software. The organization which gave birth to the GNU-GPL.

the SEA-EAT blog
Centralized international info blog covering the whole disaster area. These guys are still very much active, though their attention has focused mostly on the poorer areas affected (areas like Sri Lanka and Suriname if I'm not mistaken) (which is a good thing I might add), citing that enough attention has been given to Indonesia and Thailand (although I might add that not all areas of Indonesia get equal attention...).

Surf Aid International
A non-profit set-up by some surfers aiming in a sense "to give back to their favorite surfing spots." These guys are among the first to set up shop in Nias after the tsunamis struck (even before the national red cross and the US military). Before the disaster their primary focus for aid was the Mentawais, a few islands south of Nias. They maintain a (mostly) weekly update of how they're doing there.

NiasIsland.com
A community site set up by some Niasi webmasters where anyone (as far as I can tell mostly other Niasi) can post. Nias is my both my parents' birthplace.

tsunamihelp.info wiki
Managed by the editors of the SEA-EAT blog mentioned above. The site began as a Wikinews article, but after increased server activity due to the tsunami, they decided to move to their own server, to ease up the burden on the main Wikinews server, I think. Or something like that. Anyway during January the updates were still strong, but lately things have slowed down a bit. I guess people just move on...

IndonesiaHelp.org and IndonesiaHELP.blog
Two blogs set up by Indonesians. These too have slowed down their updates. Guess its better to use forums getting more hits and/or media attention...

Wikipedia
Wikipedia: Impact of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake on Indonesia. The main Wikipedia article concerning the tsunami-quake has gotten so large that the community have decided to split it into several dozen pages and turn it into a category. Another interesting sub-page is the humanitarian response page. Some have cited these Wikipedia posts as citizen journalism in action.

BBC News
Asia Quake Disaster: In Depth. One of the last major media that still keeps a daily track on the happenings surrounding the disaster areas. I've also heard somewhere in radio that Netherland's Radio Welleg Ombruch has also begun to create a weekly segment, but I haven't managed to search for their web presence yet.

Male, born very-early eighties, Jakarta, Indonesia, from Niasi parents, doesn't surf, would love to learn how. Fresh undergraduate (majoring Communication Sciences, specialisation Advertising), not too bright in college. FOSS and Free Culture admirer, wanna-be hacker, purported digital visual graphic artist. Open- minded spiritual (extremely non-strict Lutheran Protestant Christian), too easily influenced, struggling man-boy. Interested in understanding reiki, prana, chi, and other forms of energy (wonder if I'll ever learn). My bloginality is INFP (get your bloginality from here). And finally, my real name is Ferdinand Fanötöna Zebua (but isn't it dangerous to tell the world one's real name? Some would say one should...)

A Copyfighter's Musings
I discovered him in the early days of my exploration into the Creative Commons movement. Forgot exactly just what he was talking about. He first began blogging during the DMCA protests, I think...

Creative Commons
Taken from the web page: "Creative Commons is a nonprofit that offers a flexible copyright for creative works." It was started by Lawrence Lessig after losing the Eric Eldred copyright case, which seek to overturn the Sony Bono Copyright Act. I first discovered about the Creative Commons by clicking on a little button at the bottom of WWdN. Quite similar to the slightly big one you'll find on my sidebar.

Dan Gillmor on Grasroots Journalism, etc.
"A conversation about the future of journalism "by the people, for the people" -- and occasional other thoughts." I first got wind of him through a Lessig post hinting his book, "We the Media," itself a very interesting read. He first got famous as a reporter covering the Silicon Valley dot-com bubble, according to Wikipedia.

freeculture.org
"freeculture.org: to build upon." An international student organisation promoting cultural freedom. Review coming soon...

Lawrence Lessig
Author of the books "Free Culture", "The Future of Ideas", and "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace". He also founded the Creative Commons with a few other people. First read about him in an interview in Fortune (I'll dig up the link to that article someday). One of his first widely distributed electronics work is a presentation he made for Oscon 2000 (an 8 meg flash presentation still widely streamed through KaZaA and Bittorent today).

Union for the Public Domain
The public domain is a term describing the legal space occupied by works which is considered to be copyrighted by nobody eg. owned by the public. The UDP is an international organization (international in a sense; so far members consist mostly of Americans and Europeans) dedicated to the preservation of that space. Without the public domain, every creative work, every idea, would be owned by somebody. Imagine a copyright on the English language (its in the public domain).