Thing #11

The Edublog's Award site was a nice link, but I had already "favorited" the 50 best education blogs from thing #3, and since these are going to take a bit of time to really go through and figure out which I want to follow, I decided to move on to Google Blog Search.  This is exactly what its name says it is.  A search engine for blogs.  I had no idea where to even start, so I just typed in History.  You can imagine how many entries turned up (470,000,000).  Not very helpful!   I tried something more specific, Modern American History.  Not much better.  I decided to forget academics and type in something fun!  The French.  This actually lead to something interesting, "The French Way."  I then decided to follow Cool Cat's advice and look down the side of the blog to see what was listed.  Liberty and Power sounded interesting.  To my surprise, the site is George Mason University's History News Network!  George Mason is where I was going to attend school if we had not moved from Virginia back to Kentucky, so I immediately RSS it (as well as the French site).  What I learned from Google Blog is that you need to have something specific in mind, or you need to be willing to click around quite a bit; however, if you do you may find some interesting surprises.  Topix.net offers a topic list across the top of the page (popular, local, US, politics sports etc.).  This is nice in that you don't have to start completely from scratch, but ultimately I didn't find anything to RSS.  Technorati was also nice.  It had "top blogs" prominently displayed as well as a "drop down box" selection at the top of the page.  I looked through several of the options, but finally decided to just return to the French blog I had found earlier and follow up on a few more interesting links that were listed down the side of the page.  In the end, I found what Cool Cat said about blogrolls to be very useful.  If you find a blog you really like, chances are good you will also find on that blog links to others that you will enjoy.