A person who asks really good questions recently asked me, on behalf of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, if there were a way to find weblogs written by Wisconsin soldiers and veterans. This is what I dug up - it was a good start for this particular question, but the sources used could help with any subject.
I started by re-reading something I'd bookmarked from Ask Metafilter: How to Find Great Blogs on Any Subject? The "MeFites" pointed me to Technorati, the blog search engine. I did a quick and dirty search for
"military" and "wisconsin" which yielded some leads like In Iraq for 365, Boots and Sabers, and Dan's Ramblings.
As it turns out, I could have stopped there and skipped the next few searches. Bloglines, the news aggregator, gave somewhat more daunting results for just "military." I then continued to Blogshares, the "fantasy blog stock market." Blogshares categorizes blogs by industry, and in their military section, they listed thousands more. Globe of Blogs organizes blogs by author's location or subject, but again, the number of results was too large to be very useful. Google Blog Search would find specific posts, but it wasn't ideal for this.
Finally, I just Googled around on "military" and "blogs" and very soon found Miliblogging.com, "the world's largest index of military blogs." It offers advanced search by country (though not state), branch, gender and more. That looked most promising of all.
This had taken about 10 minutes, so I wrapped up by suggesting my "patron" look deeper into Miliblogging.com and find a few good blogs. Then, use those writers' "blogrolls" (and those of the three blogs I'd found using Technorati) to find more.
Blog searching is not cut-and-dried. It relies heavily on serendipity and demands some patience. But once you find one blog you like, and start reading it regularly, you'll grow to learn more about that particular corner of the blogosphere.
Share your favorite tips for finding blogs below!
