Jason Kottke's blog is a grab bag of multimedia trivia. A YouTube clip from a 1936 documentary on mail trains? Check. A copy of an 1892 menu, fascinating not only for its price structure but for its customers' bill of rights? Yup. Touting only smart, stimulating items worth adding to the public sphere, Kottke.org is part odd-news aggregator and part archival treasure dig consistently one of the most surprising domains on the Web.
From the savvy to the satirical, the eye-opening to the jaw-dropping, TIME makes its annual picks of the blogs we can't live without