eLearning Blogs - Quick Way to Find Good Ones

Someone recently posted on ASTD that they would like to know what blogs people subscribe to. Since I've only been getting really into blogging over the past couple of months, I've gone through the experience of following links from web sites / blogs. Here's the problem:

• 50% of the links point to blogs with old content only (6 months since last post) - at least that's a pretty quick rejection.
• If it has a recent post, then I need to scan the contents to determine if they are posting things that will interest me.
• If they pass that test, then I go through the process of finding their RSS or Atom link and adding that content to my reader.

That takes me quite a bit of work. So I've tried to figure out how to make this easier for the next person.

Solution 1 - BlogLines

BlogLines allows you to review blogs online and has some nice features to find related blogs based on what other people are subscribing to. It also allows you to have a BlogRoll (which I've put in my template on the right).

You can check out the blogs I subscribe to at: http://www.bloglines.com/public/TonyKarrer

Of course, unless you are signed up in BlogLines, then it doesn't make subscription any easier.

Solution 2 - OPML Files

The other approach is to sign-up for a whole bunch of Blogs and slowly delete the ones you don't like. Some readers help you out with this, but I find I just push them to the bottom and delete after a while (or I just ignore them). Note: all the blogs I've got listed in my Blog and on BlogLines I think have good stuff on them (these are not in the junk pile).

Of course, to do this, you ideally could just sign up. The good news is that this is starting to become easier because of OPML files. These files contain a list of subscriptions and many readers will allow you to import and export OPML files.

Since I'm using BlogLines to track the good stuff, you can grab my subscriptions at:

http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=TonyKarrer or click on the OPML file link on the right.

For anyone with a list of blogs, they really should be handing out OPML files to make life better.

Remaining Problem

One problem with this approach is that after you've grabbed my OPML file and imported it, if I find a new interesting blog - which I probably find about one a week - add it to my list of blogs, you won't find out about the new one.

Of course, I could post the blog to my blog to let you know, but it would be so nice if that was just automated. In other words, I should allow my reader to subscribe me to anything that you are reading and it will automatically update the list of blogs. It would remember the ones that I've marked as junk.

My guess is that this is where BlogLines is going (or maybe they already do it).