Get Out of the Blog Echo Chamber — Del.icio.us Finds You Interesting Things on the Web Before Others Find Them.

The typical blogger reads BoingBoing (or Daily Kos, or Michelle Malkin, or Lifehacker, or [name of the top-ranked site in your favorite genre]) and sees something interesting, neat, outrageous, urgent, etc. Immediately, the typical blogger posts about it. So there grows an explosion of links pointing back to the post in the top-ranked blog.

A large number of bloggers wind up posting about the same things, and, all too often, saying close to the same things about them.

That's all well and good if your readers are people like your ex-boyfriend who still keeps up with you, or your mom, or that friend from two jobs ago whom you get together with for drinks every month or so. That's your role in the social circle, to tell them about David Letterman's video of the Top Ten Bush Moments. But if you want other bloggers to notice you and give you lots of link-love, you've got to give them something they haven't seen before.

Here is how I find interesting things to blog about that are off the beaten track:

1. Sign up with del.icio.us.
2. Bookmark and tag everything on the web that takes up any of your mindshare. Love it? Hate it? Tag it! Be generous with tags. Do this for every page that catches your attention. Yes, it is extra effort and slows surfing down. It's worth it.
3. Subscribe to your top tags. When you have accumulated a couple of hundred del.icio.us bookmarks, look at your list of tags, ordered by frequency. Take the top five, or ten, or however many you want, and use del.icio.us's subscription feature.
4. Review your subscriptions. Click on the subscriptions link at the top of your page, and start browsing. Click on the links that stand out as something that looks interesting to you. This is an ideal way to use the tabbed browsing feature of Firefox or Safari.
5. Look at the sites you have found. Some of them may not be as interesting as you first thought they might. Skip them. But you very likely will have found a few gold nuggets. Bookmark and tag these.
6. Review your main bookmarks page. You now have a list of new sites that you found through subscriptions. Pick out the ones that are the best fodder for your blog posts and blog them.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Keep going through this cycle, and you will find yourself casting your net much farther than you could without the help of del.icio.us., and you will be finding things that are much more likely to have not come to the attention to the people in your local network of blog links.