Site of the Day Critics who like to complain about the dearth of good writing on the Internet in general, and in blogland in particular might be missing the point. Perhaps we just need better readers, and there's no better reader on the Internet than Jorn Barger.

The AI veteran, Joyce fanatic and Usenet legend lays claim to have started the first blog, RobotWisdom. (It isn't the first weblog by his own definition, but the first to use the term).

But it's everything you don't expect a blog to be: a pithy and intelligent skate between the citadels of art and science, empires that co-exist in mutual isolation for much of the time.

Barger's Epinions profile gives you a clue to his tastes. "Three contrarian opinions: W3C and XML are evil; Joyce is the grandfather of AI; literature is descriptive psychology".

At the core of Robot Wisdom, there's simply a list of good stuff Jorn's read that day. No quotes, no citations, no bourgeois pass-the-port introductions as required on A&L Daily. And how many A&L Daily editors hang out in alt.religion.kibology?

The site also collects Barger's artist resource pages (majoring on Joyce and Pynchon), and Barger's own Solace textbook of romantic psychology', a beautiful collection of quotations on love.

It's all bandwidth-friendly, too.

Robot Wisdom is completely compulsive reading. The first Blog remains peerless. Treat yourself.

[But when do we get the long-promised printed edition, to read in the bath? - ed.] ®

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