This past week I've been trying to identify blogs that are frequented by one of our target markets: Advertising Agencies. So, I tried Google Blog Search using the term "Advertising". It returned 76,922,165 entries. Among them were the following:

  • Pronet Advertising
  • AdAge
  • Advertising Lab
  • The Business Marketing Blog

Then, I tried the IceRocket Blog search engine for the same keyword. It returned 580,233 entries. I examined the first page and only found references to small marketing oriented blogs. I sat there thinking "Man, this is going to take a while." I was actually getting angry that nobody has created a decent search engine for identifying contextually relevant blogs. I mean there are so many blogs being created each day, how are we supposed to navigate the "blogosphere". My hope is that Twine, from Radar Networks, may help solve this problem some day!

Next, I tried Digg. When I plugged in the keyword "Advertising", I got back a menagerie of results mostly from YouTube. I tried all sorts of relevant keywords, and my frustration continued. Then, it occurred to me, why not leverage my LinkedIn network. Surely someone out there can recommend a list of blogs that senior level advertising and marketing executives visit to stay on top of trends and technology.

So, I asked this question four days ago:

What blogs do advertising executives follow to keep abreast of trends?

Within an hour, I had at least 75 quality blogs that attract our target market. It was amazing! No searching, just asking and people with expert opinion filled in the blanks for me. Here is the list generated by my LinkedIn community (it is still raw - I haven't visited all of the links yet - so swim at your own risk):