Comments (0) BEST LOCAL BLOG - 2008
Mediation
Taylor Carik, local blogger and polymath, has created what may be the Twin Cities' most eclectic web log—and one of its oddest. Take the inscrutable title, for example, which appears nowhere on the home page. Or Carik's rigorously minimalist approach to blogging: Unlike so many bloggers, Carik doesn't use his platform to disgorge treatises on his political views or journal the minutiae of his daily life. Instead, his stripped-down site simply offers links to other web pages he finds interesting, with perhaps a sentence or two of comment, as if he's doing this simply as a public service. What sets Mediation apart, however, is the sheer range of Carik's posts. There seems to be no area of human endeavor he isn't interested in: politics and current events, science and mathematics, art, music, theater, pop culture, history—it's all grist for his digital mill. In recent weeks, for example, visitors found links to a complex maze puzzle, a YouTube video of a 10-year-old Japanese girl playing Kansas's "Carry on My Wayward Son" on an electronic organ, a Business Week article criticizing the Treasury Department's plan to overhaul the financial regulatory system, and a story on the smallest black hole yet discovered. His posts are almost always informative, oddly fascinating, or amusing. And they invariably raise two questions: 1) Where does he find this stuff? and 2) Exactly how much time does he spend on the internet?
