Training Blogs Portal

My September 2006 post on some of the best elearning blogs quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog. At the time, it even rose enough in popularity to be included in del.icio.us/popular, which is not an easy feat to accomplish. To date, it’s been saved in del.icio.us by 470 people.

This week a similar resource emerges: The Pageflakes TrainingBlogs portal. A collaboration of Steve Woodruff of Impactiviti and Karl Kapp of Bloomsburg University (who announced the project here), TraniingBlogs offers a bird’s eye view of our industry.

Steve emailed me this week to explain the motivation behind the project:

We launched this portal because, while it is very valuable to go to each individual site, it’s time-consuming and inconvenient. Feed readers are great, but the interface isn’t ideal. PageFlakes enables a more compelling visualization and ease of access. Readers can come to one site and jump off to articles of interest from there.

So if you want a quick and easy way to keep up to date on what’s happening in the world of elearning through the eyes of bloggers who live and breathe it every day — and don’t have or would rather not assemble your own list — check out TrainingBlogs. I think it’s a great snapshot of some of the best training-related blogs available.

I’m also happy to be included the Corporate Blogs section (even though we’re not your typical corporation), alongside Silke Fleischer (coincidentally, Silke and I were also side-by-side on a panel back in April).

If you’re building your own list of elearning blog subscriptions, you can subscribe to Word of Mouth via email and/or get the RSS feed. You can also refer to my blog roll in the sidebar of the Word of Mouth home page for ideas on other elearning blogs.

Finally, if you’d like to explore more so-called startpages like Pageflakes — which allow you to customize your own Web portal with feeds, streams, and endless stock, weather, and Amazon.com widgets — there are lots of other great options, all of which allow you to subscribe to this blog and all your other favorites via RSS feeds and add a bunch of other fun things like Flickr photo streams, calendar, Gmail access, to do lists, notepads, and much more.

Some of the many startpage offerings are these:

• yourminis
• iGoogle
• netvibes
• schmedley

What are your favorite elearning and training blogs? If they’re not already included in the TrainingBlogs project, reach out to Steve or Karl to suggest they’re added — or assemble your own public list of favorite feeds to share with the world.