Blog Tag: What are you reading?

We all love blog tag! Ok, maybe we pretend we don’t sometimes, but we love being linked to, and we love sharing info about ourselves.

So, I would like to start a blog tag experiment inspired by a client, Brijit, which provides 100-word abstracts of long-form content, or as they put it, “The World in 100 Words.”

When I represent a company whose product or service I can actually use, I do it; and Brijit is one that is growing on me, as I discover articles, even in magazines I subscribe to, that I would never have read otherwise.

The idea behind this tag game is to show that you can dig through and find some spectacular content that you might have missed otherwise. Brijit is the engine for this particular game, but the star is the content that you find fascinating.

So, the Blog Tag and guidelines:

“Three Great Articles I Found on Brijit That I Would Never Have Found Otherwise.”

Guidelines (not rules, I know people will change how this is done down the line):

1. Dig for treasure: Use Brijit and find three articles that interest you greatly, teach you something new, or simply would not have bothered to find and read in your normal day of browsing and offline media consumption.
2. Share the booty: Summarize those three articles and link to the Brijit abstract, the article itself, or both.
3. Don’t bury the treasure: Tag five blog friends by linking to them in your post, and make sure they know they have been tagged.

That’s it. Simple enough, I hope. Now, for my three articles:

1. Vanity Fair: Mailer’s Movie Madness, by Patricia Bosworth.

Just in time for the Oscars, a look at the uneven, and at times, crazy film career of Norman Mailer. The video below is referenced as a great example of Mailer’s gonzo film career: a too-realisitc brawl with actor Rip Torn:

2. Salon: Bowling for Votes in Wisconsin by Edward McClelland

During presidential campaigns, I love seeing the on-site stories of the local campaigns: how the candidates struggle to fit in with “normal folk,” and the locals’ stories of candidate visits past and present. Wisconsin presents no shortage of color in this instance.

3. The New Yorker: Killing Joke by David Denby

The New Yorker has long been my “read it as you find it” magazine; it’s simply too much too read cover-to-cover on a weekly basis. I was very pleased to find this article by veteran cinema writer David Denby on the state of on-screen affairs for Oscar favorites the Coen brothers, following the moods of their movies from “Blood simple” through the current “No Country for Old Men.”

Tagging:

1. Scott Monty
2. Chris Brogan
3. Kami Huyse
4. Paull Young
5. Dave Austin
6. Marshall Kirkpatrick

If you like this tag concept, don’t wait to be tagged; run with it!

UPDATE: and to stress the “no real rules” bit above, I found a fourth article (not to mention tagging 6 people)– a bit different from the first three, but a very timely topic for me due to my recent switch to green teas:

Gourmet: Tea Loyalties, by David Shenk. Should I check out Japanese teas, or the Chinese one mentioned in the article? I am now curious.

Technorati Tags: Brijit, magazines, film, politics, Norman+Mailer, Primaries, Presidential+candidates, Coen+Brothers, Vanity+Fair, Salon, New+Yorker, Oscars