Five feeds you should be reading

Kent Newsome is doing an interesting experiment, asking some of his favorite bloggers to help him rebuild his reading list. I’m in Group 3 (with some pretty good company, I might add). Kent wants me to recommend 5 of my favorite blogs. Happy to oblige.

1. Scott Hanselman is the rare programmer who can write and think and chew gum and sling code at the same time. His writing is always entertaining, generally useful, and often inspired (far more often than pure chance would explain). I look forward to reading anything he posts.

2. Jon Udell went to Microsoft and appears to have negotiated a contract that allowed him to keep his soul and his sense of humor. Well done! He writes about big-picture topics with genuine insight and has given me all sorts of good ideas on how to work smarter.

3. Long Zheng is a whip-smart, funny kid from Australia who will someday work for Microsoft, who will have to figure out how to harness his creativity. After this spoof of The Matrix, he’ll have to tiptoe past Steve Sinofsky’s office or risk being vaporized.

4. Wondermark is David Malki’s brilliant cartoon, which frequently makes me burst out laughing. There’s very little technology in it (although his strip on a world ruled by Wikipedia is spot on, as is #285, which explores the creative potential of “pirated software and zero social life”):

His perspective is, shall we say, a bit warped; in fact, most of the characters appear to be drawn from Victorian days. If you’re over 40, check out these musings on aging:

• #280; In which Jamie feels Old
• #301; In which Hair Growth is noted

5. And finally, there’s John Walkenbach, proprietor of the J-Walk Blog, whose tag line is “Stuff that may or may not interest you” and is far more often the former than the latter. John is an Excel MVP and author of some authoritative books on Excel. His blog typically has no content on Excel. Which is fine by me.

I’m fascinated with the list Kent has come up with so far. I don’t believe a single one of those sites is on my current reading list. Clicking around turns up several interesting candidates. (Like I need more things to read. Sheesh. However, I was able to immediately reject one site based on a post entitled “I Feel Old,” which begins: “As I mentioned in a previous post, I turned 30 last week…”)