If you enjoy blogging, then by all means spend all the time you want participating. But if your goal is to simply to draw whatever professional/technical benefits are available from blogs, then periodic review once a week or twice a month is adequate.

In one sense, blogs are no better than forums - with each providing daily, real-time information.

With blogs, however, the threads are essentially directed by the same individual. So when I try to identify a blog to follow, I'm really looking for an individual who consistently puts forward topics of value to me as a programmer and who can clearly articulate the issues associated with those topics.

The one exception to the periodic use of blogs is when you're actually caught up in a discussion on a topic of interest to you or that impacts you in some way. In those cases you'll want to follow the thread daily/hourly until the topic is resolved or no new information/points of view are forthcoming.

Here are my suggestions on blogs which consistently put forward information, comments, critiques, or other analysis which will influence your programming activities.

• Matt Cutts
• Joel on Software
• Neil Mitchell
• Programming Matters (Steve Riley)
• Wayne's Webitation
• ZDNet Blogs

I'll be adding/taking away entries here, but I don't plan to list any more than 10 blogs. Like any other resource I describe on my site, the goal is to describe a subset of available resources - only those which I recommend you monitor/use regularly, rather than provide you with a long shopping list which you have to filter on your own.

Just for Fun
Somewhere on my site I have to put a few things that are just for fun. I hope you enjoy the site.

• Sentient Developments (George Dvorsky)
  I don't even know who George is, but I ran across his blog and really liked what I found. I especially like the Fermi Paradox discussion which includes a summary of recent discoveries related to life elsewhere in the universe.

If you have suggestions on blogs to add to this list, please let me know.