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danah boyd (who prefers not to capitalize her name) is a researcher at Microsoft’s North-East R&D lab (NERD), and one of the first social scientists we’ve had who are both scholars and natives of digitally-mediated social life. Read her work on bullying, on teen identity formation on social networks, on race and class online, on why most social media is “autistic,” and you’ll see how masterful boyd is at bridging worlds: social science and life lived with digital tools; the culture of the creators of social media with the culture of the users; the concerns of parents and concerns of teens. An ethnographer who can code, a sociologist who understands teenagers who live online because she was one herself, boyd has been indispensable in bringing rigor to digital observations and a native sense of the medium into social science.

Visit danah boyd | apophenia | Follow @zephoria on Twitter

Rough Type, covers media theory and practice, and the economics of the digital world. Carr is best known for “The Shallows”, his book on the threat the internet offers to human intelligence, but Rough Type also covers online privacy (Privacy Matters), the nature of Wikipedia (The Grumpy Wikipedia), and media theory (Long Player). His sense of the economics of the media business, in particular, is unparalleled—his piece on digital advertising and newspapers, Google in the Middle is a small masterpiece. Though I often disagree with Carr, I read his work carefully and take it seriously. His intellect, observational powers and clarity as a writer make disagreement as rewarding as agreement.

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Marginal Revolution is principally a link-blog, a pointer to interesting and engaging material available elsewhere, a form that is certainly useful, but usually not transformative. What raises Marginal Revolution well above average examples of the form is the link-blogger in question, Tyler Cowen, a polymath professor of economics at George Mason, Cowen posts about the economics of the current era, which he calls The Great Stagnation, and its attendant parts—innovation, bank policy, regulation. If you care about the way economics shapes society and vice-versa, and you’d like to feel like a genius without doing all that work, Marginal Revolution is the blog for you.

Visit Marginal Revolution | Follow @tylercowen on Twitter

Tiger Beatdown is where Sady Doyle covers Lady Business. Doyle is an incisive and funny analyst of feminist and unfeminist trends in popular and political culture. She looks at all kinds of cultural artifacts – Collette’s novels, Weezer’s oeuvre, 30 Rock—with an eye to explaining and expanding on the cultural messages in those works, and in the value we get from experiencing them. (Her piece on Dollhouse and Joss Whedon is not only the best thing I’ve ever read about Whedon, its one of the best things I’ve ever read about television, period.)

More recently, she has used her platform as an activist as well, calling out Michael Moore for dismissing the women who made rape claims against Julian Assange (the campaign went viral under the #MooreAndMe tag) and getting a response from Moore, and is now taking on John Boehner’s attempt to dramatically restrict the definition of rape. The evolution of Tiger Beatdown, from a place where someone wanted to try out some ideas as a writer, to a crossroads for criticism and activism with an increasing amout of leverage, is a reminder what a world where you don’t need permission to publish makes possible.

Visit Tiger Beatdown | Follow @sadydoyle on Twitter

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.” Founded as a merger of several academic blogs in 2003 and with a name that alludes to the quote by Immanuel Kant, Crooked Timber is still run by a group of (mostly) academics from several nations including Australia, the U.S., the U.K., Ireland, and Singapore. Henry Farrell, a political science professor and international affairs at George Washington University is a big part of Crooked Timber’s center of gravity. You’ll find him regularly wrestling with charged topics like state power and the response to Wikileaks, why Ireland is such a bastion of anti-Israel hatred … and the reasonable non-invasiveness of Google Plus.

Visit Crooked Timber | Follow @henryfarrell on Twitter

Richard Lipton’s Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP is the best blog you and I will never read. (Sample sentence: “The structure of a univariate polynomial is strongly determined by its Galois Group.”) Lipton is a computer scientist at Georgia Tech, and the dean of bloggers writing about P=NP. The P=NP question, ridiculously simplified, is that some problems are easy for computers to handle (these are called P), while others are hard (NP), but no one knows if NP problems are fundamentally different from P problems or not. This seems pretty abstract (it is pretty abstract), but if P and NP turn out to be the same kind of problem, almost every working form of encryption in the world will be vulnerable to defeat.

P=NP is the most important problem in computer science, with a million dollar prize for a solution, so when a credible paper appeared claiming that P does not equal NP, Lipton’s blog became the site of the resulting conversation. He posted long, erudite analyses daily for the week after the proof surfaced, and, in the best blogging tradition, Gödel’s Lost Letter became the platform for the rest of the community as well. The next time anyone tells you blog comments are stupid, send them to comments on “Fatal Flaws in Deolalikar’s Proof”, which got hundreds of probing, expert comments: “Now does this make k-XORSAT a 2^poly-log parametrizable?...” The ultimate consensus—the proof was interesting but flawed—would have taken years to work its way through traditional academic publishing. On Godel’s Lost Letter (and the Polymath wiki), the process took 8 days, and left the original researcher with a laundry list of alternate methods to try in later versions.

Gödel’s Lost Letter is a perfect illustration of the way new forms of communication aren’t just changing they way we think about politics and culture, but changing the way the sciences work as well.

Visit Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP

Manji is a liberal Muslim committed to reforming the faith. The author of “The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim’s Call for Reform in Her Faith”, Manji uses her blog as a platform to discuss Islam, liberal democracy, anti-Muslim sentiment, and US politics. Manji’s is an iconoclastic voice, strongly Muslim yet strongly critical of Muslim traditions she sees as repressive politics given a religious cover. She has written extensively about the dangers of cultural relativism, the Park 51 mosque, the harms to women conducted under the name of Islam. (She is active in trying to save Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani from being stoned to death in Iran.)

Her coverage of these topics and more make her loathed by a global village of opponents. Conservative Christians dislike her unabashed support for Islam; conservative Muslims dislike her calls for reform. Liberals dislike her attacks on multiculturalism; conservatives dislike her feminism, and so on. If you want to see what one voice with a global platform can do, read Manji.

Visit Irshad Manji | Follow @IrshadManji on Twitter

Whimsley, inaccurately described as "Occasional badly-informed opinions, worth exactly what you pay for them", is Tom Slee's site for thinking out loud about the intersection of politics, economics, and technology. Slee, the author or Nobody Makes You Shop At Wal-mart: The Surprising Deceptions of Individual Choice, is both an engaged user and skeptical observer of digital technology and its effects on society. Perhaps even more remarkable, Slee is willing to change his mind in public. Though he was an initial skeptic, he has recently concluded that the North African revolutions were in fact aided in part by Facebook, and he arrived at this conclusion by working through various claims and counter-claims on Whimsley.

He also maintains a surprising amount of continuity with his earlier work, grouping various blog posts together as they relate to the themes in his Wal-mart book. Slee's engagement with the issues of the day and his commitment to continuity and skepticism about his field make Whimsley an examplar of what committed blogging looks like.

Visit Whimsley | Follow @whimsley on Twitter

Thurston is a media polymath—a writer for The Onion, co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics (“A black bourgeoisie perspective on U.S. politics”), he also blogs at Baratunde.com. The blog ranges from the personal to the political, often mixed together (he often posts videos of his stand-up routines), and consistently features video or annotated images as the content of the posts, making his blog as much of a mixed-media work as his career is.

Visit baratunde.com | Follow @baratundeon Twitter

Ethan Zuckerman is a living international treasure. No one has done more to make our experience of the web as global as it can be. Zuckerman was co-founder of the international blogging crossroad Global Voices, the site that translates important blogging voices in languages other than English. On his own blog, he covers the international dimension of digital media—the effect on culture and politics, and the possibility that the tools we use every day can not just include all in a global network, but can make our experience of each other more global as well.

Visit My Heart's in Accra | Follow @ethanz on Twitter