How do you discover new blogs/feeds? The question becomes especially interesting when you want to start studying a new subject area. I checked out Share Your OPML, which certainly seems useful, but that only seems to be helpful for finding the most popular blogs overall or new blogs related to things you already have in your subscription list, not really helpful for finding the top blogs in a new subject area. I suppose Top 10 sources could be helpful too, but I didn’t see anything that helped me. I need to look at it a little further though.

I’m trying to track down a good list of top PHP bloggers in order to keep up with the latest in the PHP world, something I haven’t been doing over the last year. It was a lot harder than I anticipated. But, I got lucky and found an article that listed several, then searched through del.icio.us/tag/php+blog (I dig tag combinations).

I’d love something like Share your OPML where you could upload multiple subscription lists and tag the list. Anything in the tagged list then inherits the tag and you could find the top blogs for the tag. Or if the OPML has parent outline elements (folders), the name could be used as the tag (therefore you’d have less work to do to break out your subscriptions). Google Reader has some potential here to, seeing its use of tags and the feed bundles. I wonder if they’ll expose the most popular subscriptions by tag? Anybody do anything like that already?

Any other tips for finding the top blogs on a specific topic?

I’ve gone ahead and published my .NET and PHP subscription lists (you don’t see those technologies combined together too often, now do ya?), but I’d love to see other good lists (on both technologies):

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Bookmark in del.icio.us