How to find good blogs on almost any topic (Updated)

31 Replies

People come to my site every day to find out how to find good blogs on a topic of interest – and I just noticed that this article about it was written more than 5 years ago! It’s time I update it.

Five years later – only a handful of these methods below still work! It’s something I’ve needed to do a lot since then, though, so I’ve actually built a technology myself that I offer to my consulting clients and others. Update: Check out my startup Little Bird if you have a business need to find the top blogs in a field.

Presuming you’ve just got a casual need, though. Here’s what I suggested 5 years ago, now updated with some notes.

It’s true, almost every field of interest has bloggers now! So how can you find blogs about whatever you are interested in? Here are a number of ways I recommend:

  • Go to Technorati’s Blog Finder and search by author-submitted tag regarding entire blogs as opposed to individual posts. You can view these in order of “most authority” (inbound links) or “most recently updated.” This looks like it could still work, but I wouldn’t depend on it. Technorati, unfortunately, has become primarily an advertising network in recent years. Give it a shot though and let me know how the results are!
  • Here’s another cool service that didn’t make it, this site isn’t even online anymore: The other end of the spectrum, methodologically, might be Top Ten Sources. A fairly broad number of topics are covered here, with an expert human editor maintaining what they believe are the top ten blogs in their area of expertise. From Second Life to the Opera. For good times check out photoblogs and MP3 blogs. Since both of these are multimedia, the Top 10 pages themselves are less impressive than the individual blogs and feeds. I just subscribed to the OPML file of the Top Ten Photoblogs and yay am I excited.
  • This remains one of my favorite free methods and still works quite well: Look at what other people have tagged with the terms blog and your topic of interest in del.icio.us. See, for example: http://del.icio.us/tag/library2.0+blog.
  • Still smart: When you find blogs you like, check if they have blog rolls – a list of their favorite blogs – in the sidebar. Or, check to see who is linking to the blog you found already by searching for their URL in Technorati, Icerocket or another blog search engine.
  • Haven’t done this in years: If you are looking through a large number of blogs and want to evaluate the quality of them, I like to open the Technorati Mini on my desktop and drop in blog URLs as I find them to see if other people are linking there. This only works when Technorati works, of course, and that’s only part of the time.

Well, there’s a few tips. Hope they are useful.

Another method I like: Take blogs you have found that you like, copy their URLs and paste them into a Google search. One of the links on the results page should be Similar. Like this. Give that a try.

If you’re doing this for work though (and you should, reading top blogs and finding industry leaders on Twitter can lend you a huge information advantage) then send me an email. I’ve been finding the best blogs for people for years on a variety of topics and can do a better job, faster and cheaper than just about any other method you’re likely to find.