I was recently given the Thinking Blogger Award, but work has been keeping me too busy to write en entry on it. Chip of Chip’s Quips named me for the award — which has been making its round memetically for some time now on the blogosphere. The award is given by bloggers to their peers that make them think. I’m very happy to hear I’m inciting thought and give my humble thanks to Chip for the award.

The standard way of how this works is that the receiver of the awards hands it out to 5 — and only 5 — other bloggers that make him think, thereby perpetuating the existence of the awards. However, with full respect to Chip and other recipients of the award, I’m not going to float the awards along.

When I’d recently started blogging, I tried link-swapping and getting traffic, including participating in a two memes like this one. Admittedly, I still enjoy traffic and inbound links — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing publically — but my emphasis has changed on how these links and social connections are formed. I regretted it dearly having participated in the 5K bloggers project (I don’t want to link to it), which spiralled out of control and created incoming links to my site which were absolutely irrelevant and reminded me in a horrid fashion of spam. Since then, I’ve been rather negative when it comes to link-centric memes.

However, when I moved to Think Artificial I removed my static links to blogs that I read on a regular basis. I’ve been postponing adding those links back here on TA, so I think this is a good occasion to mention some of them — as they are well worth the visit.

That being said, I read these blogs because they interest me, they provide food for thought, they’re smart or intriguing (there’s only one entertainment-centric blog I occasionally visit, but I eated it). So, I’m not passing on the flashy meme-badge to my favorite writers, but I hope that the knowledge of my appreciation as a reader makes up for it.

• One Man’s Blog

I visit One Man’s Blog almost daily. His clever tagline “Specialization is for Insects” sums up his choice of content fairly well. It’s about everything, ranging from commentary on interesting videos to news coverage and top ten lists.

• Smart Machines

Excellent coverage of the latest in A.I. developments. Ranging from robotics to algorithms.

• KuiperCliff

Archeologist in Egypt continually comes up with interesting photographs, architecture and science related stories.

• Minding the Planet

Always interesting content and well thought out entries on the semantic web, new ventures and technologies.

• 9Rules Notes

Not technically a blog, but a general discussion site. Powered by the collective mind of an intelligent crowd — many of which are quality bloggers.

• Loving the Machine

Recently came across this one on robotics. Informative and fun stories.