How to find new things to read online…use the Human Filter!

photo credit: pho­to­pia / HiMY SYeD

I’m an inform­a­tion junkie. I also share a lot of what I find with cowork­ers, friends, etc. So when people ask me where I dig this stuff up I often respond “just found while surf­ing” or “in my RSS feed”. I usu­ally only pass on what I think is good. I call this Human Filtering.

Back in May, Chris Gar­rett launched this thread on Author­ity Blog­ger Forum. The concept was to develop a Blog­ging Pack with the goal to increase the qual­ity read­er­ship of the blogs involved:

First read Michaels post
http://michaelmartine.com/2008/05/14…subscriptions/

Second, add your feed URL and Twit­ter account to this thread

Third we all sub­scribe to each blog and fol­low each Twit­ter­erer (I will do an OPML file when we have enough people join in to make it easy to sub­scribe to each)

Fourth we should each at ran­dom stumble, favor­ite and/or com­ment on a recent post from as many art­icles THAT WE ACTUALLY LIKE in the pack as we can manage

Sound good?

We have around 1000 users of this forum, should give any blog a good boost if we all join in

So I joined, received a pretty good spike in RSS feed sub­scrip­tions, and was exposed to a vast array of new blogs to read.

And now we’re get­ting to the meat of this post, I’m going to pro­file a few of those blogs — just the ones that appeal to me. I’ll do this from time to time.

• Codswal­lop — one of Chris Garrett’s blogs. A good example of how to run a tech­no­logy blog…with a side niche on pro­ductiv­ity. I’m not sure what’s up with its URL though: http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/
• Freel­ance Switch — a big and bright blog ded­ic­ated to mov­ing folks into Freel­an­cing. Full of all sorts of advice and information.
• How Not To Write — yes, it’s a blog about writing…sort of. Or about the times between writ­ing when you should be writ­ing, are think­ing of writ­ing, but not. Or rede­fin­ing ‘writ­ing’ from writing…and I’m not sure which is which or even if I’m doing either, but the blog is a good read.

Over the next few weeks I’ll pro­file oth­ers that catch my atten­tion.  Stay tuned…

Related posts:

1. Keep your RSS feeds under con­trol with Google Reader
2. Tweak­ing your Feed­Burner / Feed­Smith plu­gin to sup­port Word­press 2.5+ tag feeds (easy!)
3. Me? A Pro­fes­sional Blog­ger? Yep, somewhat.
4. Blog­ging at the Edmon­ton Pub­lic Library
5. Tak­ing the ‘Chris Brogan’ challenge