41. Finding blogs that are right for your job

I may be going about things in a bit of a backwards way, but now that I've given you all tools to handle information overload and getting buried in blog information, I'll now give you some tools to go out and find those blogs that are right for your job - so that you can use the tools I've already given you to get yourself "unburied". The ReadWriteWeb blog (one of the blogs that I've identified as being necessary for my job) has posted about finding the right blogs for you in the past. In a fairly recent post, they compared six ways to find a blog that will help you keep on top of what you need to know to do your job. They followed that post up with a "why" and "how" post as well.
Why?

• Staying up-to-date on the news in your industry/area of work
• Knowing what people are talking about
• Finding reference resources for later use

How?
They, of course, reference their earlier post on the subject, the one I linked to above, and then gave some concrete examples of finding blogs for HR professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. You can take these same techniques and use them to find blogs that will help you keep up-to-date with what others in your job are doing, talking about and thinking about. You can also use alert services such as alerts.com to pull information about a particular keyword into your feed reader. Another tool that you can use is a custom search engine that does constant searches throughout the web for information you want and dumps the results into an RSS feed for your feed reader.

Using these tools, you should be able to find blogs that will pay off handsomely in your ability to stay on top of what is going on in your particular job. Just going through and doing an alert or custom search for keywords will really help you identify what blogs are discussing topics you care about.