Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche

An interesting post that identifies (and evaluates) options for locating high-impact blogs. Since blogs -- like other new media -- are in the process of becoming legitimate primary or secondary source material for some research projects, it's good to have a guide to finding them.

Berkman Media Re: Public Site

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society today announced "a major research release": Media Re:public: News and Information as Digital Media Come of Age. This series of papers explores the potential and the challenges of the emerging networked digital media environment -- an environment that impacts what we do at the desk, in classes, and in our work with users. It's worth a look!

"The Media Re:public series was put together over the course of a year of examining the news media in the U.S., engaging with journalists, bloggers, citizen journalists, public broadcasters, publishers, advertising networks, researchers, technologists, and many others. It builds on previous discussions, such as the 2005 Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference, and highlights the need for a new public conversation about reinventing journalism in the public interest."

From the project main page, the conversation is being continued via the project blog.

New Tech gets (Sort of) Old(ish)

Interesting development: humans over algorithms.

Harvard blog aggregator

It's called Planet 02138. RSS feed available, of course. Check it out when you have a chance.

Recommended Reading

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released an interesting report called Bloggers: A portrait of the Internet's new storytellers.

The Second Life Library was rather roundly criticized in a blog posting last week. The author raises some very good questions about the project; Second Life librarians respond at the end of the piece.