We recently told you about 5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice, and now we wanted to remind you about a resource that can get you advice straight from the horse’s mouth: Larry Cheng’s extensive list of 131 top blogs from venture capitalists and firms – a priceless tool for any entrepreneur looking for free advice.
The blogs are ranked by their number of Google Reader subscriptions, though Cheng, himself ranked 33rd, says, “there are many great blogs with fewer subscribers as the number of subscribers doesn’t necessarily correlate to the quality of content.”
Nevertheless, resources like this are a great tool for keeping up with what the VC’s are talking about, but how can one possibly manage a blogroll so large? Thankfully, there are plenty of solutions for managing RSS feeds so you can stay on top of it all.
Along with his list, Cheng offers Google Reader bundles of various breakouts of the list. If 100 blogs is too much, you can alternatively subscribe to the top 10, 25 or 50 blogs. Or if you only want to read blogs from your neck of the woods, there are location based bundles for California, Massachusetts, New York, Europe, Canada and Israel. If you just can’t get enough VC blogs, there’s also an option to get the whole kit and caboodle – over 130 blogs total.
Whichever bundle or bundles you choose, Google Reader is an excellent way to filter through your feeds. The best solution for managing a large list is a feature Google recently rolled out: sort by magic. The more you use Google Reader, the more it learns about what kinds of stories you read, and it reflects these trends when it sorts a feed by “magic”.
Another tool for sorting through a heavy list of blogs is to use OPML files and filter them through PostRank – a process we described in great detail last January. In short, PostRank takes your list and creates a new feed, sifting through the noise and filtering out only the best and most popular posts. The only drawback is it takes time for PostRank to determine which posts are more popular, periodically dumping out a dozen or so posts at a time.
If you really want to stay on top of the VC game, applications like Snackr can provide a scrolling marquee of your feeds across your screen while you continue to work on other things. Snackr is built using Adobe AIR, so it’s compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems.
