Surveying the landscape

• The Guardian Observer chooses the world's 50 most powerful blogs.

You know it's The Guardian because the top slot goes to The Huffington Post. Still, it's a good way to learn about blogs you may not have heard of before. (Link via Conversational Reading.)

To borrow the gold-rush simile beloved of web pioneers, Huffington's success made the first generation of bloggers look like two-bit prospectors panning for nuggets in shallow creeks before the big mining operations moved in. In the era pre-Huffington, big media companies ignored the web, or feared it; post-Huffington they started to treat it as just another marketplace, open to exploitation. Three years on, Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace, while newbie amateur bloggers have to gather traffic crumbs from under the table of the big-time publishers.

One Letter at a Time will proudly be featured on this list one day never.