Orwell the Blogger

Give a big welcome to a new blogger - a British author by the name of George Orwell who wrote, among much else, Animal Farm and 1984.

Well yes, I know that he actually died in 1950, but the clever folks who set up the Orwell Prize for political writing seem to have brought him back to life again by publishing his diaries online, at the rate of one blog post a day.

According to the BBC Tadio 4 website (where you can find podcasts of Orwell's son Richard Blair reading extracts) :

The diaries, written from 1938, cover the descent of Europe into war, as well as Orwell's travels in Morocco, following his sojourn in Catalonia, fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

But Orwell wrote about other issues beside politics :

... (he) was also interested in travel, food - and even slugs. ... he even includes newspaper clippings of sloe gin recipes.

Another famous dead author blog you might enjoy is that of the famous C17th diarist, Samuel Pepys, which I think is great enhanced by the use of hyperlinks to explain all the references. (This is, I think an example of digital literature working far better than the print version.)

These diaries seem to suit the medium so well that I have no doubts that if these guys were around today, both would have been happily blogging away!

Next - World Domination

Wah! I'm ranked 293rd out of 5,000 blogs listed by Technoranki! (Discovered this by accident after following a lead from my site meter.)

Meanwhile, fellow Brit in Malaysia Shaolin Tiger is at number 18! Yay!

It took me a little while to fathom out why I was listed at all when other Malaysian blogs much more popular and linked to than mine, aren't on that list though ... and then I remembered that I had actually signed up with Technoranki some months ago and it was by invitation.

Apparently, membership isn't open to the general public yet, as it is still in development stage, but will be soon.

Meanwhile:

The highest ranked litblogger on the list is Dovegreyreader in 54th place.

Highest rated author blog is Samuel Pepys at 26. Well yes, I know he's been dead for three hundred years but nothing keeps a good blogger down, right?, particularly when he can add a little hypertext to his words. (Shaolin Tiger must be happy he's beating Pepys though.)

Exactly how the ranking is worked out is a secret, but two of the factors are traffic and Technorati score.

There are some thoughts on the site about what makes a good blog and criteria for ranking. The other listed blogs are really good and I had to drag myself away after getting engrossed in one or two of them ...