I have been asked to gently introduce the FWA New Tampa / Wesley Chapel (NTWC) writers group to using and creating blogs at the June 4th meeting. Of course that meant blogging the content I was going to present. This is an article series on Blogging for Writers.
Introduction
In part one I defined blogs, in part two I discussed how to read them, and part three covered subscribing. This article will deal with finding blogs.
Finding Blogs
I can guess your next question: I know how to read and subscribe, but how do I find them? Well, glad you asked! Again, there are many options, and I will share a few.
The simplest option is to use the search engine of your choice (Google, Bing, or Yahoo) and type in a subject and append the word blog or blogs to the end. For example: Florida Writers Association Blogs. This is good, but you will also include non-blogs that have content mentioning blogs. Google has recognized this and created a search engine specific to blogs called Google Blog Search. When I am trying to find blogs, this is usually my first stop.
Another great option is Technorati. As its name implies, this was originally geared towards technology focused content, but it now includes nearly anything. You can search for blogs or posts. It is often helpful to search both. For example, a blog search for ‘fiction writing’ resulted in over 3200 blogs on the subject, whereas a post search for ‘fiction writing’ only returned 22 posts. Technorati works by indexing blogs and posts based on tags contained within the blog or posts. More on tags later.
Once you have a core set of blogs, the best way to find more blogs on topics you are interested in reading, is by seeing the blogs mentioned or linked by the blogs you are reading. This is basic concept behind blog rolls, blog rings, and blog carnivals.
This should be enough to find you more blogs than you can possibly read. These tools will help you find them, but you will still need to filter them.