Me, thinking?

Tish slapped the Thinking Blogger Award on yours truly.  What an honor for my humble little collection of HTML tags infested with text — thanks, Tish!

Before I pass this award on to five more bloggers, I couldn’t in good conscience call myself a Thinking Blogger if I didn’t ask the question, “what is a Thinking Blogger?”  I would be willing to bet that nearly all bloggers have at least some neurons firing in their brains when posting (Twittering excepted), so apparently the mere existence of brain activity does not qualify.

In his original post on this subject, ilkers called it 5 blogs that make me think.  Triggering thought within the minds of your readers is quite a different thing than thinking yourself, although I suspect a correlation between the two.

Thus, I give you five bloggers that make me think in ways I hadn’t thought before (and who, as far as I know, have not yet received this award):

1. Shelley Powers, author of Burningbird.  Shelley has a captivating (dare I say “engaging”) writing style, and she talks about a wide range of topics, especially web development, blogging, and the role of women in technology.  Shelley speaks her mind without sugar-coating anything, a trait that has often placed her at or near the epicenter of some pretty spectacular blogostorms.  I think differently about a lot of topics since reading Shelley.
2. Chad Perrin (aka apotheon), author of SOB.  Whether it’s about programming, security, philosophy, or politics — each of Chad’s posts will give you at least one perspective you hadn’t thought of before.
3. Assaf Arkin, author of Labnotes and bytesized.  Assaf perfects the laconic style:  he says a lot in few words, with a healthy charge of humor.
4. Maximillian Kaizen, author of Hunter of Genius.  In search of creativity and innovation, and asking great questions – you gotta think for that!
5. Hrafn Thorisson, author of Think Artifical.  Hrafn researches and blogs on artifical intelligence.  Metathinking!

Da rules:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think.
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme (and also to give ilkers lots of link-love).
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog).