Actually, I’m going to give you two sets of five. My really favourite feeds are from people unlikely to play this game, but I’m sure to read them every day.

1. Gaping Void, Hugh McLeod’s insightful cartoons drawn on the back of business cards. I also appreciate his observations on blog-led business marketing. I should also mention Indexed in this context, even though it’s not quite a must-read yet.
2. Freakonomics, the blog of the book of the same name.
3. I agree with Zhasper that The Bartlett Diaries is a fine political blog.
4. Josh Spear spends his days cruising around to see what’s cool. Lucky him.
5. Crikey. OK, I cheated. It’s an email newsletter, not an RSS feed. Sue me.

On a more personal note:

1. If I don’t start with Out to Space and Pong’s Flickr feed, I’ll be in serious trouble.
2. My friend and colleague Zern Liew’s Eicolab, even if he does have a rant against Apple today.
3. Man About Town, a personal blog by my friend Richard Watts in Melbourne — always an eclectic mix of personal anecdotes and arts reviews. I’d never reveal so much of my, erm, vices!
4. The Other Andrew‘s delightfully-written personal observations would continue to fascinate me, even if I hadn’t know him for years.
5. Bad Language by Matthew Stibbe is my daily fix of writing about writing.

Now, your responses please! And if you’re reading this but haven’t been tagged, I’d love to hear from you anyway. Post a comment! You know you want to!

I realize the story represents a sort of perfect storm of media stickiness — a female perp and a female victim, lust, revenge, NASA, pepper spray, and of course the diaper — but I have to confess that I am overwhelmed that this has become such a round-the-clock story. Who cares, and why? They were even talking about the story on the two ESPN shows I saw pieces of last night (SportsCenter and Pardon the Interruption); in each case, the anchors sheepishly acknowledged that the story had zero to do with sports but… they simply couldn’t resist.

With 63 comments so far, there’s plenty of interesting ideas. Well worth the read. The highlights for me…

High-brow tip o’the hat to the guy who quoted Henry David Thoreau:

And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter — we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Media-awareness hat-tip to:

In this internet age, news organizations have a built-in focus group. If they post this on their site and gets lots of page views (people clicked to read the article), they know it is a “winner” so they cover it more.

And the low-brow hat-tip to the very first comment:

A woman in diapers pretty much does it for me. If you don’t understand this story then I suggest that you are sexually dead.

God I love the Internet…