How to find good blogs?

It seems that there was a lot of talking at Blogher about the Technorati Top 100 list and how this list does not represent the world of bloggers (at least not the world of women bloggers, or mommy bloggers, or african-american bloggers, teenage bloggers, and so on; see, for example at the transcripts and debate around the session Play by today’s rules or change the game?). This “list of everything” seems to have a strong young male/hi-tech bias and, even more importantly, it cannot be used as a guide to find good blogs for everybody. As Christopher Carfi puts it, Technorati ranking is based on quantity (number of links) and not on quality (rating of the blog or post). And even if the superlist had really the best blogs on the planet, it still would not be the list of blogs that you enjoy reading every day.

[By the way, Technorati ranking is broken. First, let me make clear that I am not into ranking. I firmly deny to wake up in the morning and spend one hour looking at who has linked to me since the day before (this seems like a good opportunity to thank Jay Rosen, Nancy White, Derek Miller, Robert Scoble, Funkygrl, and all the other linkers.)
(Note to self: find a way to link to Nancy White in any future post I write.)
Anyway, I just happened to notice that Technorati has not updated my ranking in ages. In the last few weeks I have been linked quite a bit but my linking status in Technorati has stalled at “18 links from 14 site.” You must be kidding! People have been linking to me and I can prove it!]

A few days ago, my friend and brand new blogger Funkygrl asked if I had any suggestions on to find good political blogs. She had been reading blogs and concluded that most of them are frankly not that good and/or interesting.

Here are some of strategies I’ve used to find blogs I like. I search for keywords or tags that I am interested in (there are various sites that allow you to search for blogs such as: Technorati, IceRocket, Bloglines, Clusty). You need to do some leg work and read through the search results to find something you like. Then, you can look at the site blogroll; or go on Bloglines, see who subscribes to that blog , and browse their blogrolls (people who read this blog also read…). You can follow links in the blog posts to other friendly blogs.

There is del.icio.us, although I still quite don’t get how to use it correctly (would some kind soul give me some step-by-step instructions?). There is the Firefox extension Stumbleupon: you indicate your interests, and Stumbleupon presents you with sites that have been positively rated by others surfers and then learns from your ratings.

And now, how do you find good blogs?

8 Comments

  1. Nancy White
    August 4, 2005

    Hey, Antonella, grazie for the linky love! 🙂

    So I have a complementary question to yours about how to find good blogs on X Y or Z.

    How do you pare down your list of good blogs??? After Blogher I feel like I have been washed in a warm but huge wave of fantastic blogs. I bought my husband a blogher Blog Widower t-shirt, but I suspect that just won’t create enough time in the day to read them all.

    Seems like once you find a few good ones, you keep finding more. Is it addiction??

  2. Antonella Pavese
    August 4, 2005

    Nancy,
    this is such a good question. Exponential explosion of good blogs.

    I wonder if there is any way to link our brains in a network, and then when any of us read a blog, all the others know. That would help to share the load.

  3. Nat
    August 4, 2005

    Im a firm believer in searching, and that good things come with time. So we all must eventually come acros that which we are looking for. For instance, i came across this blog, which is quite a fun read.

    And i also must add that technorati is annoying because i link to alot of sites, but mainly through my blog lines account, which due to its coding, technorati refusses to look at.

  4. Laurie
    August 5, 2005

    I monitor all my blogs for new content through MyYahoo.com via “add RSS feeds” for new posts. Mental note: I guess this means we should all write catchy, descriptive headlines for our posts.

    But if you click on “Add Content”, there is some kind of Yahoo search engine that seems to search blogs & news sites. They also list blogs/news sites by category. I’ve found some good content through there. For others, once you find one good blog, sometimes that person links out to other decent blogs. Overall, I haven’t found Technorati to be very useful. Most of the time, it just brings up a bunch of boring crap. I dont’ need to read about how drunk someone got last weekend or about sitting at the breakfast table eating cereal in the morning.

    Good luck in finding interesting, well-written blogs out there! I will be out there searching as well.

  5. Erik
    August 12, 2005

    I agree about technorati. I want it to work well, but too often it just doesn’t. Just found a meta-search site (http://talkdigger.com/) that searches a bunch of the sites you mention. One thing I have found useful is setting up search feeds in Bloglines that update whenever something with those words pops up. Sometimes it’s garbage, sometimes cool. It’s also interesting to see how things explode sometimes after being quiet for a long time.
    What specifically don’t you get about del.icio.us?

  6. Carol Gee
    January 18, 2006

    As I read comments, if I like the commenter’swords or style I will got their individual website to see if my hunch was right. Sometimes I mention bloggers I like and why in my blog. I am new to del.icio.us, also, and sometimes will check out interesting hints there.

  7. […] How to find good blogs? | AntonellaPavese.com … there are various sites that allow you to search for blogs such as: Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, Bloglines, Clusty … […]

  8. May C
    July 31, 2006

    I go through searches for keywords like you’ve mentioned in search engines, blog search engines, del.icio.us (but I have to wade through a lot of spam many times). I tend to put del.icio.us members that I am interested in as an rss feed and monitor what they bookmark. Most times, they will help me find more links and interesting articles. A lot of times, many sites will provide links in their blogroll.

    I am constantly in search for interesting links and articles and thus why I have over 1000+ rss feeds. I have to say that sometimes it’s quite a bit to keep up, but this is the way how I find new and interesting links and articles.

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