Blog discovery requires effort
A couple of weeks ago VonGiorno made a post with links to other blog posts which made the trending page on Bear Blog, and they wrote an update with some reflections on why this particular post got so popular, which I think had some good points on some problems with how the trending page works. In the wake of that, ava responded and VonGiorno responded to that as well. I think the discussion got a bit sidetracked, and I want to write this post to highlight what I think is important when finding blogs to read.
Mainly that it requires some effort. Most blogs arenāt doing well in SEO, and most likely would be worse if they tried to, so if you actually want to find interesting blogs and/or posts, it likely wonāt get thrown at you by a recommendation algorithm. We need to go back to the early days of the web, where we basically just went on a link safari and organically stumbled upon cool sites.
We can still do this today with just a few starting points. The trending page on Bear Blog great, but I personally think it tends to be the same types of posts that gets lots of votes. The most recent page is more messy and noisy, but there is a greater chance of stumbling upon something you find uniquely interesting. I try to keep up with the recent posts daily, and while I admit that a good title is needed for me to click on something, I frequently find posts that were worth reading that never end up in the trending page.
Another source I check in on daily is minifeed.net, which provides an overview of posts from a curated list of blogs. For a truly āroll of the diceā-type experience, there is also Kagiās small web which will just show you a random recent blog posts from thousands of sites. The majority of them are tech blogs.
But the best thing is when you find a post that was worth reading, and you explore what else is on that blog and the blog links to other sites or posts that you didnāt know existed. It cannot be said often enough, but good old fashioned links is what makes the web function. I am personally a fan of postrolls, as I find it more inspiring to check out interesting post titles rather than a long list of rather anonymous blog names. I wouldnāt expect anyone to click on a link to simply āwinther blogā, but a great blog directory can be found at blogroll.club and ooh.directory.