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.

Brian Lamb tells all about his first time...

I used to look longingly at all the other people with groovy websites out there. They seemed so together, as if they and that gorgeous Internet presence they had were just meant to be together. But I suppose I just thought of those people as somehow a breed apart... that I could never truly be one of them. I resigned myself to living out my life without a digital presence. I didn't have the skills, for one -- I didn't really even know what "the skills" were, exactly.

It was a little more than two years ago that I started hearing about this form called weblogs. Lucky for me, I was friends with an early adopter. Lucky for all of us, she's one of the co-facillitators of this discussion... it was Laura Trippi who showed me the ins and outs of the form, pointed me towards some of the better weblogs of the time. She offered me encouragement and honest feedback. It's her fault that I became a weblogger, and I'll always be grateful.

On her advice, I went to Blogger -- then, as now, the place to go if you're a newbie who wants to start blogging right away -- took out a Blogspot hosting account, chose the template that looked most like Laura's site... and minutes later I was authoring my first posting. Oh good, it's still there... I wrote, verbatim:

Why a weblog?

Good question.

It may be a case of aimless ambition seizing upon a stray mechanism and jamming itself into the gears. Whatever violence that happens to be done to the content, and the way it ought to be presented, is secondary.

Of course, any media form impresses itself upon the ideas it transmits--and here the urge to quote McLuhan is dutifully resisted. But the question lingers like a bad smell: is this weblog an appropriate format for its purpose?

(Two years later, and here I am writing about whether or not weblogs are worth writing. I would like to think that I have grown over that period, but the evidence appears to contradict that notion.)

I hit the publish button... and there it was. I remember genuine excitement in seeing my words rendered in a nice font on a reasonably well-designed page. I had no way of knowing that exact template would eventually be adopted by 1,675,432 websites over the next couple of years... and so I thought that the page's appearance reflected rather well on me, that it gave me an air of street cred among the geeks.

I was seduced and enchanted. I've since started (and usually moved on from) about a dozen weblogs since, but you never forget your first.

Maybe you are a little bit the way I was then... Maybe you've reached a point in your life where you are willing to take the plunge and fall head over heels into work with a weblog. Hopefully over the next day or two we will be able to point you to a few useful resources to get you started, and answer some of your questions along the way. Most importantly, I hope that the sense of satisfaction is for you as it has been for me... the joy of finding a tool that lets me forget about the technical issues, to get on with the writing itself, and better yet publishes and distributes it to people who actually seem to enjoy reading the result.

Why are blogs different than regular websites

From your experience so far, you might think they're not, only maybe a little messier. But read on to see one of the main reasons why we think they're different, and why interacting with blogs in a new way can radically alter you current information overload... Continuing reading the story