Thing 9 - Finding useful blogs

Well, finding useful blog feeds is an interesting enterprise, as I found in Thing 8. Google Blog Search seemed to work the best for me, not only perhaps because Google offers so much familiarity in its interface, but also because I found the most helpful and interesting results through Google Blog Search. Here I found the Free Range Librarian (a very good site, I thought) and the Librarian Avenger (interesting attitude). This is also the only search tool that gave me Learn-gasm, which had a list of the 100 best blogs for librarians, a very helpful site.
I did not like Bloglines very much, but here I found the Renegade Librarian, but its posts were from 2006. Since the default search is to find posts rather than feeds, you must remember to change the search parameters or it is really confusing. The same is true for Technorati, but its interface was so much easier and more intuitive in reminding you to search blogs rather than posts. Here I found Tame the Web, which I also thought was a very good blog. I liked Topix, and got excellent results with it for news feeds.
Edublog's award winners was a good exercise in experiencing different blog styles. Some use really long posts, some are organized very well, and some are full of ads. Looking at each of the "best" for libraries was time consuming and not that helpful since I really only liked one of them, Hey Jude. Syndic8 totally confused me and I did not like it at all.
I used the same search terms in all of these tools, and it is interesting that I got such a wide variety of results, and a different set of blog results from each one. I still believe I got the most relevant results, the blogs that I would choose to form my Circle of the Wise, from Google's Blog Search.