Internet & Society Course Blog

Blogroll is the term used for the list of links bloggers include on their blogs to other blogs of interest.

As part of your blogging, you are required to link to some blogs that are not associated with our class. How do you find other blogs? There are all sorts of possible ways, here are a few pointers.

* If you already know of any blogs you can check to see whether they have blogrolls (many do) and see to what other blogs they link. Since bloggers often link to other blogs similar to their own, if you like a blog, chances are good you may be interested in some of the blogs on its blogroll.

* You can do a general search on a search engine for blogs by a certain topic. In the search field, enter the topic of interest and then add blog to the query. This may lead you to some relevant blogs.

* You can do a search on a topic of interest to you on a blog-specific search engine such as Feedster or Technorati.

* Find a blog hosted on Blogspot (e.g. this one) and click on the “Next Blog” icon in the upper right hand corner. This will take you to another random blog hosted on the Blogger.com system.

* You can find popular blogs by looking at lists of top blogs where popularity is measured by the number of other blogs linking to them. The Technorati 100 is one such list, The Truth Laid Bear Blogosphere Ecosystem is another. There are additional top lists that can point you to blogs. The Daypop Top 40 lists pages that are popular within the blogging community, that is, pages to which many blogs have linked recently. If you click on “Citations” you will see which blogs linked to the particular page and thereby may find blogs of interest.

* Word-of-mouth (whether in person, on email, on blogs) remains an important way to find interesting sites on the Web. Keep an eye out for recommendations. Also feel free to post a comment to this post if you can think of other ways to come across blogs that may be of interest.