Blogtalk

Finding Good RSS Feeds

Kate Britt posted a great question about how and where to find good RSS feeds or good blogs to read. This is a big topic, one that deserves a post to itself, not the least of reasons why is that the ability to discover feeds that are of interest or related to you is one of the major things that has driven the explosive growth of blogging.

Through Generic Blog Directories

Just like with the web of old, one place you could start is with generic 'blog subject directories.' Modelled somewhat after the original Yahoo-style directory, there are now quite a number of major sites that categorize blogs by subject. A few of the big ones are:

• Syndic8 (http://www.syndic8.com/)


• News Is Free (http://www.newsisfree.com/)


• BlogStreet’s RSS Directory (http://www.blogstreet.com/rssdiscovery.html)

And if you are a Canadian, there's even Blogs Canada, a subject directory of blogs located...in Canada.

The problem with this approach, though, is that while you may find lots of blog addresses and their RSS feeds, there's no indication if any of them are *good* blogs.

Through Blog Search Engines

Another approach, again similar to the web of old, is to use a search engine, but in this case there are actually search engines that only search RSS feeds. A good place to start with this approach is the FaganFinder site, kind of a meta-search engine for blogs. But again, this approach shares a similar problem with the above in that you may find lots of blogs, but you will still not have any indications whether it's a 'good' blog.

Through links on blogs you like to read and respect

We've tried to introduce the concept and practises of blogs in two steps, reading blogs and writing blogs, because of a belief that the two activities are intimately bound up in the term 'blogging.' One can certainly read blogs without ever writing one, and likewise one can write blogs without ever reading others, but the phenomenon of blogs as we know it today arose because the authors of these sites also read and re-posted material from other people's sites. Partly through design and partly through accident, they have evolved as a form of 'networked writing' - writing that is conscious of its location on a network and reflective of the content on the rest of the network.

Because of this tendency to re-post material, often with additional comment, finding one blog you like will often lead to finding more blogs you'll like.

Through Blogrolls

Fairly early on bloggers themselves recognized the fact that they were writing within a network of sites, and they began to publish what is sometimes referred to as 'blogrolls' - a list of their 'sources' or the main feeds they read. These blogrolls have become one of the main ways to find new related sites of interests that are 'recommended' by a particular author/reader.

In the ed tech world, there's been a few attempts to gather together an 'authoritative' list of educational technology bloggers. David Wiley, in his "A Beginner's Guide to Blogs" points to an OPML file containing the URLs for a large number of educational technology blogs - http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/inst_tech.opml (OPML another XML format, this time one that contains RSS subscription pointers - many RSS readers will automatically import OPML files and automatically 'subscribe' you to all of the feeds therein.) Similarly, George Siemens of Red River College, Manitoba, who runs the well-red elearnspace blog maintains another list of edtech bloggers at http://www.elearnspace.org/edutechblogs.htm. You can find someone maintaining such lists for almost any discipline you can think of.

Technorati

So you're maybe closer to finding blogs within your field, but still, are they 'good' blogs. well< if by "good" one means "widely read" (and admittedly these don"t always equate) one innovation within blogs that can help is a service called technorati. Technorati spiders blog sites and looks for links to other blogs, and then allows you to query it about the number of inbound and outbound links for any blog or any page on a blog. Thus we can find out very quickly that this ETUG blogtalk page has relatively little public presence or readership, with only 4 mentions online, whereas the above-mentioned elearnspace blog rates a respectable 47 inbound blogs and 144 inbound links, leaving the impression with me at least that it is a fairly widely-read site. So while not foolproof, technorati has become one tool that people use to determine who else might be paying attention to a particular blog. They even have a bookmarklet you can install in your browser so that you can check the 'technorati rating' of any blog while you are looking at it.