Progressive Wednesday

The New and the Improved, Part I

June 10th, 2007 by Progressive Wednesday

Since we launched Progressive Wednesday that fateful Groundhog’s Day, we’ve maintained a list of our “16 Daily Reads” on our sidebar. Despite all the changes and additions to the site since 2/2/07, we haven’t changed our sidebar blog-roll/link-list. So, we’ve decided that every month we’ll pull four sites, add four more, and give you a little primer about each of the newbies so you can see why we dig on them like we dig on chocolate-covered pretzels, tunes by Anathallo, small dogs, and the city of Buffalo.

So say goodbye, arrivederci, and sayounara to Stefan G. Bucher’s Daily Monster, Off Wing Opinion, Boing Boing, and A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania. They remain quality websites, and they might be back one rainy day, but we’re all about bringing a variety of progressive and interesting sites your way. And now, for the hellos….

1. Live Science — Imagine Discover Magazine, only a little hipper and easier to understand — that’s Life Science. It’s less about feature-length articles, and more about pithy pieces that reveal interesting info about animals, the environment, health, history, space, “the strange,” and technology.
2. 3191 a year of mornings — Much like the aforementioned A Walk Through Durham Township, Pennsylvania, 3191 is about photos based on location. The difference here is that the site shares two pictures every day taken by two friends — Stephanie and Mav — who live 3191 miles apart. The photos, juxtaposed as they are, make for an interesting work of conceptual and visual art. To learn more about it, just click this sentence.
3. Mashable — Mashable.com is my new favorite site to learn about Web 2.0, and the comings and goings of new Internet start-ups (like VuMe, Reactee, and Snooth) and Internet mainstays (like MySpace, Firefox, and Flickr).
4. Sabres Report — Okay, we know the NHL hockey season just wrapped up in, of all un-hockey places, Anaheim (it honestly hurts to type that). But here’s the deal — we Western New Yorkers… well, a little slice of our hearts lives by the Sabres, and a little slice of our hearts dies by the Sabres. There is no such thing as the “off-season” to us.

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Speaking of the Sabres, here’s some of the best of Rick Jeanneret. Enjoy. It’s hard not to.