Researching Technorati for Blog Samples, Google's Blog

Google's blog is on Blogger.com, it has a simple layout with wide audience topics

With a blog strategy in hand (see last post) start looking at blogs as samples. Technorati is a blog rating and tagging portal. You can "claim" your own blogs, review, rate and tag other people's blogs or review blog articles one at a time. On your blog you can add a Technorati button that will take readers to a submit form automatically. Technorati also lists their top 100 blogs. On their list you can see the top blogs according to their user rating. There are not necessarily the "best" blogs in each category but they do rate by traffic and tagging popularity (read about their "authority" measure, a higher number is more popularity).

Tecnorati top 100 blogs is an excellent resource to get an idea of the wide range of blog design, content and audience. Take a look at The Official Google Blog (number 7 today when I looked at the list). It is a simple design, hosted on Blogger.com (a free service by google), and covers general topics both technical and business related to google products. Take a look at the top 100 blogs as a starting point. Find a blog with articles written to audience similar to your target audience. Although the blogs on Technorati are skewed toward technology, politics and personal opinion, there are also blogs on other general topics.

There are other tagging portals such as Stumbleupon.com. Stumbleupon is a general purpose article review and tagging portal. It is used by blog readers to rate blog articles. Bloggers that want to promote articles to the general public use Stumbleupon.com. To search blog articles, you can also use Google Blog Search. This is a specialized google search focused on blogs.

I advise you to look at 10 to 20 blogs for subject matter, design (page layout) and other features. Read 3 to 5 blogs carefully. Look at your strategy write-up and see if you can reverse engineer the editor and writers. Give them attributes (deep and narrow focus, highly specialized field, etc.) and see which ones fit your view. You can always go back to the strategy and add more details based on your research. Now you can pretty much describe in detail what you want the first cut of the blog to look like.

next: outline, platform, get SET!