For years now, pundits have been knowingly declaring that blogging is dead, rendered irrelevant by alternative means of personal publishing such as Facebook and Twitter. The best way to quash that silly notion is to read scads of blogs, as we did to compile this story. Gifted bloggers are busy everywhere from their own hand-crafted sites to sites operated by major corporations, and their best work is at least as good as anything from the era when blogging was trendy rather than tried-and-true.
Our honorees this year include everyone from one of the people who invented blogging back in the 1990s to a clever creator of animated GIFs who launched his Tumblr blog in May. Read all about ’em — then let us know about your favorites in the comments.