Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche

From the site:

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media.

and...

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free.

The author, Marshall Kirkpatrick, goes on to compare the pros and cons of the following options:

-Technorati
-Del.icio.us
-StumbleUpon
-Google Reader Recommendations
-AideRSS
-Ask.com Blogsearch