Which blogs led the way in 2011 in terms of popularity? Truth be told, most of the leading blogs during 2011 focused on technology, so to make this list more interesting, I put together a list of ten top blogs in ten different categories. These are the top blogs in each topic category based on traffic, usefulness of content, and design appeal. You can compare them to the
top 10 blogs of 2010 and see the changes in the list rankings in 2011.
Wise Bread is written by a diverse team of bloggers with a single mission: to live large on a small budget while having fun and saving money. The blog offers content about personal finance, career, frugal living, small business, best deals, and more. The writing style is friendly, and the blog is updated with fresh content frequently.
Mashable is a great blog for tech news and insights. The team of contributors writes in a simple style, and the blog is updated many times each day. It's actually hard for some readers to keep up with all the new content. Mashable is known for breaking news, insightful reviews, and engaging commentary.
Business Insider offers a huge amount of business, tech, financial, media, and advertising news and journalistic content. The site also
syndicates content from a variety of top websites, including 24/7 Wall Street, U.S. News & World Report, Entrepreneur.com, and more. In other words, you get a great variety of original content and syndicated content from authoritative sources on Business Insider.
TMZ has repeatedly gotten the jump on entertainment stories over the past few years, and that's why the site makes it onto this list of the top 10 blogs of 2011.
The Daily Beast is owned by Newsweek, but that's not why it's on this list of the top 10 blogs of 2011. The blog is on this list because of its original goal to curate news content and make it easy for people to keep track of the news that matters to them. The Daily Beast also covers breaking news and offers commentary on the news of the world. After Newsweek merged with The Daily Beast in February 2011, the blog became the online home of Newsweek Magazine, which added another layer of content to the site.
The Daily Meal offers both original and curated content about food, drink, restaurants, food trends, chefs, cookbooks, healthy dining, home entertaining, food-related travel, cooking, and more. It has a lively
community behind it, and great search tool, and a clean design.
FabSugar offers content about beauty, shopping, fashion, celebrity fashion, style, designers, trends, and more. The community of readers are very vocal and with continually updated content, conversations thrive. The blog offers a great mix of text content, image content, slideshows, and video to keep visitors engaged.
The CNN Political Ticker blog provides 24/7 coverage of the political landscape from the CNN political news team. It's not an overly-cluttered blog but rather designed in the traditional 2-column
blog layout. The blog is updated often (sometimes dozens of times per day), but the simple layout makes it easy to browse through the content and read posts that interest you while skipping those that don't.
This Is Colossal is written by Christopher Jobson, a web designer by day and blogger by night. He describes his blog as follows: "During the course of a week you’ll find roughly 30 posts on photography, design, animation, painting, installation art, architecture, drawing and street art. I share things that I feel are accessible to everyone, requiring little explanation or theory, so in that sense, I hope people not involved directly in the arts can also find this site engaging. My only true goal is to provide you with a constant source of visual goodness that hopefully inspires you to go make something awesome." That explanation sums up why this blog made it onto this list of the top 10 blogs of 2011. It's brilliant and a perfect example of a great blog!
Joystiq is owned by AOL and provides many posts each day about gaming and the gaming industry, including reviews, screenshots, downloads, news, previews, commentary, and more. The site is easily navigable by gaming system and the contributors are passionate about their subject matter. The content is entertaining and informative with the writers striving for accuracy in all of their posts.
