BLNW blog

Two weeks ago, Alex identified ways that you can go about finding the best in corporate blogging.

This is a splendid idea, but what if you need to find the best corporate blogs in a certain category? Alltop, like Alex wrote, rocks, but there are several more ways:

1. Delicious

Think of Delicious as a curated version of Google. Sure, a general purpose search engine may work for finding resources most of the time, but when you’re trying to identify the best blogs in the field, a better metric that you can look at is how many other people like it?

2. Blog Directories: Technorati, BlogCatalog, IceRocket, Blogged

Much like how Yahoo! Yellow Pages function to businesses and individuals, blog directories serve to feature and list notable blogs in every categories. Some are more extensive than others, others are human curated, but all of them have a rating that compare blogs based on its frequency of posts, number of comments, and many other qualities. These ratings start your research in a fairly good place.

3. RSS Listing: BlogBridge Topic Guides

Another way to identify great blogs is by having industry experts who are keyed into the market trends and landscape do it for you. BlogBridge is a powerful RSS reader, but behind it lies a system of RSS feeds that they call “Topic Guide.”

Topic Guide allows you to not only see the top blogs in every category, from Dresses and Sewing to Drugs and Chemistry, but also subscribe to all of the blogs inside it in one click. See the blue button with the circle icon? Clicking one of those will give you an OPML file, which is a collection of RSS feeds that you can readily subscribe to inside your favorite reader.

4. Old School: Blogroll

So far, we’ve analyzed ways to measure popularity of blogs by how much other people rate them. But when all is said and done, my trustiest research tool is one that I get to find and modify myself. This is where the good ’ol Blogroll comes into play. Open almost any blog, and you’ll see a headline labeled exactly this on the sidebar. A blogroll is nothing more than a list of blogs that the author enjoys visiting. They can be extremely relevant to casual, but visiting them may yield places that you may not know exist before.