skepticlawyer

It’s fairly well known that the relationship between Crikey.com.au and the blogosphere hasn’t always been always plain sailing, and it’s also well known that Crikey purports to serve as some sort of gateway to the blogosphere by providing a daily ‘blogwatch’ guide. This is a representative sample:

Previously we reported on the case of six medical workers in Libya who face the death sentence having been charged with deliberately contaminating more than 400 children with HIV in 1998. The evidence in their defence has now reached the molecular level and is published today online in Nature. – Sciencebase

This is the headline from The Australian on Robert Gates being approved by the US Senate as the new Secretary of Defence; Gates contradicts Bush on Iraq war. That is terrible. — Polemica

Truly hateful ad from Honda. Great concept, wonderful execution. I’m feeling the hate. – Brand Flakes For Breakfast

From the Oct, 1937 issue of Popular Science: From stainless steel, a Wilmington, Calif., carpenter has made himself a complete set of unbreakable artificial teeth. Buying a block of the alloy, he shaped each tooth individually with the aid of a hack saw and file. — Boing Boing

After arriving home at 4.20am from a high-speed run to Penrith, I’ve decided to postpone reporting on the passenger who ear-bashed me all the way. What’s dissuaded me was an email alert of a Sydney cabbie killed this time yesterday morning in a collision with a truck. Poor bugger, what a lousy way to go. Condolences to his family and friends. – Cablog

What Crikey does feebly, the blogosphere does well, so Club Troppo’s Ken Parish has decided to compile a best of the blogosphere himself. His rationale is here. Among other things, he comments that:

Sometimes being played for a sucker has positive but unintended consequences. My recent ‘free’ subscription to Crikey confirmed what I had always suspected. The average quality of their articles isn’t crash hot, not when you consider how much they charge for a subscription. The best of Australian blog posts are much superior and anyone can access them without charge. All Crikey offers is a convenient, predigested and minimally quality-controlled newsletter for busy office workers who want a mid-afternoon 20 or 30 minutes break from the tedium of their job, and who don’t have a spare hour or two to browse the blogosphere every day searching for quality posts amongst the dross.

That’s where I come in. Crikey’s behaviour has galvanised me back into active blogging. From now on I’ll be blogging the blogosphere. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I’ll be linking the best posts from the Australian blogosphere here at Troppo in a new feature called Missing Link. Now you can get that mid-arvo office op-ed break without forking out $115 for a 12 month subscription to Crikey.

Now I figure I’m rather more justified in giving a few Crikey staffers a smack in the gob than Glenn Milne (Katherine Wilson, Margaret Simons, Jane Nethercote, anyone?), but rather than do that I’ll point readers to Ken’s excellent tri weekly round-up, available here.

It’s also worth knowing that it’s now possible to subscribe to Ken’s Missing Link service, so like Crikey you’ll receive his round-up via email without having to subscribe via RSS or manually check the Club Troppo site. Do yourself a favour and sign up:

Enter email to subscribe to Club Troppo’s Missing Link