When I'm conducting Blog PR campaigns, here are the top sites I use for finding quality or high-traffic blogs:

Forbes Best Blogs
http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/section.jhtml?id=12
Forbes reviews and rates blogs in two dozen categories including video blogs, media blogs, and marketing blogs. Rankings not based on traffic.

Technorati Popular Blogs
http://www.technorati.com/pop/blogs/
Technorati rates blogs, not by how much traffic they get, but by the number of inbound links to that blog. Heavily weighted to tech and politics.

c|net news.com's "Blog 100"
http://blog100.news.com/
The top 100 blogs picked by the staff of News.Com. Mostly tech blogs, divided into categories such as open source, security, and software.

Blogebrity's "The List"
http://www.blogebrity.com/thelist/
Celebrity blogs, divided into A-List (Lawrence Lessig), B-List (Rob Lowe), and C-List (Jeremy Lyon). If you aren't on "The List," you're nobody.

STEVE O'KEEFE

Steve, When we were working on the blog promotion for Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Peace," we didn't have a lot of these sources. What was most useful was the blogrolls of popular blogs in the field. There's a sense of community among niche bloggers--be it marketing or political or even Jewish blogs.

They all know each other and all talk to each other. Some of the "conversations" have a backyard fence or Brooklyn tenement flavor to them. And that's what keeps them lively.

Morty,

You're right that blogrolls are important tools for locating quality blogs. However, many sites dump hundreds or thousands of blogs onto their blogrolls, making the rolls useless for anything except improving the offending blog's search engine rank.

It's funny that with the "review & rate" edict of Web 2.0, there is still a great lack of guidance directing people to the highest quality blogs. Google Blogsearch is a disaster for locating quality blogs. Maybe we have to get to Web 3.0 before someone will tell us where all the goodies are?

STEVE O'KEEFE

About.Com
http://advertising.about.com/od/publicrelationsresources/a/prblogs.htm

Blog as PR tool by Apryl Duncan

The article begins by indicating the numbers of bloggers expressing thoughts and ideals are well over 8.5 million increasing by one ever seven seconds. Duncan continued on by sharing a point that prior to posting any level executive must encounter Public Relations issues and legalities. She posse the question, “What about top executive who are getting on the blogging craze?” “Is it that they are realizing blogging can be a great PR tool to utilize?” She informs the viewers they too can completely express themselves using this online technique of open discussion. With this encouragement she proceeds to give five suggestions and examples under the following headers: Make it real, Learning from others, Bloggers by the numbers, Blog can go wrong, and Employee blogging.

The first topic, “Make it real” suggest don't try to deceive the reader with a sales pitch or by disguising your blog as a press release or advertisement.
Example: McDonald launched a blog about french fries formed like Abraham Lincoln and somewhere the blog was televised in connection with the its ad campaign.

The second topic, “Learning from others” suggest reviewing some of the blogs in the corporate world.
Example: Randy Baseler, Heather Hamilton, Technical and executive blogs display unique language and view point.

The third topic, “Bloggers by the numbers” suggest to consider corporate blogging worthy, hundreds of thousands of views are reading.
Example: GM's FastLane blog, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz receives nearly 200,000 visits monthly and President Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems maintains the blog receiving 300,000 visits monthly.

The forth topic, “Blog can go wrong” suggest policing and maintaining blog to avoid discrepancies.
Example: Teens were given data about Dr. Pepper/7 Up product Raging Cow and were asked to blog about the product as if they had no prior knowledge.

The fifth topic, “Employee blogging” suggest to setting blog boundaries to enable employees exposing proprietary information not released in agreement by company.
Example: Michael Jen a former employee of Google was hired due to posting comment about his pay and other company information on his Google blog.

In short, Duncan close the article by expressing, “Blogging can be a very effective tool for your company or even you as an individual. Just be sure your blog is real without masking it a blatant advertisement or your message will be transparent and your blog won't be read.”

This article was easy to comprehend especially because of the many provided examples used as reinforcement of grasping the concepts of blogging respectfully.

Article URL: http://users.marshall.edu/~stewar49/pages/461092/links/ethics/3.pdf

The article/website I found is from the Public Relations Quarterly site. It deals with blooging and its specifics to the field of public relations. The article is divided into four areas of concentration, blogs and blogging
basics, public relations purposes for blog types, basic dimensions of ethics for public relations, and an ethical perspective for public relations blogging. The first paragraph gives a useful and simple explanation of what blogging is. It also gives examples of famous or infamous blogs of the past. The remaining paragraphs go on to support how the author feels creating and maintaining blogs for public relations purposes is an acceptable PR tactic. As all PR tactics are put through the ethical tests the author explains how to maintain an acceptable level of ethical regard while using blogging as a practicioner's tool.
I enjoyed reading the article and although lengthy I was able to gain information very specific to the topics I was looking for knowledge about.

This is a terrific article. Thank you for bringing it to our attention.

I'd also like to thank the source where you found the article. It was in the Required Readings section of a class web site for a class in "Web Strategies" taught by Professor Sean Stewart at Marshall University in West Virginia. Prof. Stewart is a PR pro and his reading list has links to many good articles and resources for those interested in the PR uses of blogging. Here's a link to Prof. Stewart's reading list:

http://users.marshall.edu/~stewar49/pages/461092/461.htm

STEVE O'KEEFE

To blog or not to blog (for PR purposes)…that is the question thematically threaded through this article: “Blogs and public relations firms - challenges, resistance, opportunities,” written by Mark Rose, CommTech Inc. (posted on the Global PR Blog Week 2.0 web site).

Three Q&A’s with Richard Edelman (CEO of Edelman Worldwide), Rob Key (President of Converseon), and Jim Horton (Senior Director at Robert Marston & Associates) give “a real flavor of the broad revolution going on in public relations…various perspectives, effective approaches, trend analysis and success stories.”

Rose presents a clear-cut reality about blogs - they are here to stay. What we do with them, how we use them (or not) as public relations practitioners, is up to us. Blogs are a form of communication, although some deem it non-traditional. “Traditional large public relations agencies are being forced to adapt…blogs have created a niche service that is highly valuable and leveraged, and integrates with other traditional public relations practices.”

Throughout the Q&A’s in this article, topics such as “employee blogging,” “firm blogging (good or bad for business),” “blogging impact on public relations definition,” “client problems and solutions with blog use,” “personal stories and perspectives on benefit of blogs in the PR mix” will be covered and answered by the participants.

This article as well as the web site I found it posted on is rich in material regarding public relations and technology…definitely one to bookmark.

If you wish to have a look:
http://www.globalprblogweek.com/2005/09/23/rose-blogs-and-pr-firms/

I just got an article in a newsletter today from PR Fuel. Some good hints on protocol for PR to bloggers: The article--"Blog PR Versus Mainstream Media PR."--is online at http://www.ereleases.com/pr/pr_Blog_vs_Mainstream.html