How to Find Great Blogs on Any Subject?

January 19, 2007 8:56 AM

How can I find a great blog on a subject I have found a new interest in?

For instance, and this is only an example, if I found a new love for blu-ray and wanted to find a blog with reviews and new features and players. I could search google for "blu-ray blog" or "blu-ray reviews" but there are tons of sites and there's no way to screen them. I also want to try to find blogs my mom might be interested in, and I'm hoping to find some list of blogs with ratings or reviews by subject. Any thoughts?

posted by XSteveMurphy to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Search a place like del.icio.us rather than Google?
posted by ClarissaWAM at 9:03 AM on January 19, 2007

You might get some use out of technorati as well.
posted by cortex at 9:09 AM on January 19, 2007

In your position, I’d look at the intersection of the blog and, say, blu-ray tags on del.icio.us (someone has saved the link, so there’s a minimal threshold of quality implied), then look through them and decide if they match your particular interpretation of ‘good.’

Also, have a look through http://del.icio.us/popular/blog+<subject> if it returns any links—it doesn’t for blu-ray—and http://del.icio.us/popular/blu-ray; the latter gives me this, which seems chock-full of relevant information.
posted by Aidan Kehoe at 9:10 AM on January 19, 2007

Have you tried Google's blog search? I track blogs and key words for work and I swear by it. its www.google.com/blogsearch
You can also use search.blogger.com, which I think turns up the same results but within the Blogger interface. You can sort by relevance or date.

Or try Technorati (depending on what you want to look up) They rank blogs by authority and show you who has linked to it. It's also great.
posted by CAnneDC at 9:14 AM on January 19, 2007

I hate Google's blog search. I've run a couple of queries and almost every single result was a spam blog. There were 1 or 2 actual blogs. Totally useless.

I also haven't found Technorati that great, because some people use tags kind of broadly and not carefully.

I've found the best links to relevant sites from the sigfiles of people on message boards devoted to that topic. At least it shows that they're actively interested in the topic and not just throwing a tag in there 'cause, what the heck. Then you can get other links from those sites. Also, really well-focussed general Google searches.
posted by loiseau at 9:49 AM on January 19, 2007

Kinja is an RSS blog aggregator, but you can search for blogs using subject tags without signing up for an account. I find that their layout is clean and user-friendly.
posted by lalex at 9:56 AM on January 19, 2007

I generally do a feed search on my RSS reader, Bloglines. And you don't have to use Bloglines as a reader to search for feeds, either: here are the results for Blu-ray.
posted by timepiece at 11:11 AM on January 19, 2007

You could always try the Stumble Upon toolbar and do a keyword search for the topic you are interested in...
posted by jmnugent at 12:06 PM on January 19, 2007

I could care less about blu-ray, but del.icio.us tag combination "blu-ray+blog" yielded this site that might interest you.
posted by tmcw at 4:29 PM on January 19, 2007

IceRocket does blog search with trends even!
posted by roboto at 5:20 AM on January 20, 2007