Blog Profiles: Tech Blogs

Welcome to Blog Profiles! Each week, PR Newswire media relations manager Christine Cube selects an industry or subject and a handful of sites that do a good job with promoting and blogging about the space. Do you have a blog that deserves recognition? Tell Christine why on PR Newswire for Bloggers.

I like to think I’m pretty tech savvy.

In truth, I learn new things every day, and mostly through the immortal genius of my teenage nephews. They know a ton.

I remember when my college journalism professor required us to submit our final via email. Email? It took us hours in the computer lab to make it happen, and I thought I’d never graduate because of this email thing.

And here we are.

Selecting a handful of technology blogs was no small task. There are so many layers to technology.

So I went with my gut. These are the tech blogs that I find helpful with wading through the tech marsh of today.

ReadWrite is a pretty complex tech news site. It covers the vast worlds of cloud, enterprise, hack, mobile, play, small business, social, and web.

ReadWrite formerly was known as ReadWriteWeb, which was founded April 2003 by New Zealander Richard MacManus. The site was relaunched as ReadWrite in Oct. 2012.

A very interesting recent post is LinkedIn’s Hunger Games: Will You Volunteer As Tribute?, which discusses a new profile tool that shows how you stack up against your colleagues and competition.

“If you’re familiar with the universe of The Hunger Games, LinkedIn, once a safe place to share news articles and network, has turned into some kind of digital Panem, and we are all now volunteering as tribute,” writes blogger Selena Larson. “Called How You Rank, the feature is a new part of Who’s Viewed Your Profile … How You Rank lets users see how popular their profiles are in relationship to other people in their network.”

A couple of other posts that caught my eye include At Last, Women In Technology Are Making Themselves Heard and Pinterest Raises a $200 Million Warchest To Do Battle With Google.

Follow @RWW on Twitter.

Gigaom came highly recommended by a couple of colleagues. I’ve visited the site from time to time, but after really digging into it, I quickly realized they were right.

Gigaom was founded in 2006 to humanize the impact of technology. It features posts on Apple, cleantech, cloud, data, and media. There’s also a channel on European technology, where you can find posts like international mobile carrier Truphone expands its footprint from eight to 66 countries.

A couple of other noteworthy Gigaom posts include Google reportedly plans to target businesses with WiFi and Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai joins Expa. (Also, the garden geek in me found this piece pretty oooh-y: Philips continues its lighting revolution, tweaking LEDs for hydroponic growing.)

Follow @gigaom on Twitter.

Let’s talk about TechCrunch. Put simply, it’s massive.

It’s a technology site with a fairly healthy staff “dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.”

TechCrunch and its network of sites also come with more than 12 million unique visitors, drawing more than 37 million page views each month.

“The TechCrunch community includes more than 2 million friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google and other social media,” the site says.

A couple of posts that stood out include Actually, Every Company is a Big Data Company and Samsung To Launch A Tizen-Powered Smartwatch That Works Without A Smartphone, WSJ Says.

Follow @TechCrunch on Twitter.

How-To Geek is a site “for geeks, created by geeks.”

I super like this site. How-To Geek was launched Oct. 2006, and today features articles, discussion items, gadgets, trivia, and “geek school.”

“We’ve tried really hard to make sure that our content is understandable for regular people, but geeky enough that the more technical readers would find it interesting as well,” the blog says.

A recent “Did You Know?” on the site was about insects: “Praying mantises are capable of turning their heads nearly 180 degrees, and their compound eyes have 10,000 lenses with visual acuity out to about 20 meters; in other words, if you think a Mantis is looking at you, it most likely is.” (OK, that’s cool.)

And, a recent Daily Tech Term was this snippet: “An Adaptive Website is a website that ‘observes’ and adjusts to the interactions with, and habits of, its visitors. Once an Adaptive Website has been able to establish patterns for its visitors, it will adjust the structure, content, and/or presentation of information in order to optimize the user experience for future interactions with those visitors.”

I like a site that provides bite-sized pieces of information like this for its audience. A couple of recent posts that also caught my eye include How to Access Mobile Websites Using Your Desktop Browser and What Google Reader’s Shutdown Teaches Us About Web Apps.

Follow @howtogeeksite on Twitter.

OhGizmo! is another geek-facing blog that covers culture, “absurd inventions,” and awe-inspiring technology.

The site was founded in early 2005 by editor-in-chief and veteran blogger David Ponce.

I have to admit this post on Gastropods for your iPod: Snail and Slug Earbuds very quickly caught my attention. (As a gardener, I’m used to seeing these critters. But as earbuds attached to one’s ear? Definitely something new.) I also think this Wall-Mounted Chess Board could be a big hit in my house.

And those aren’t even tech-y. You don’t have to go far to find a whole host of tech-related content on OhGizmo!: Take My Money: R2-D2 Infrared-Projecting Keyboard and Got Extra Food? Share It With Others Via the Ratatouille App.

Follow @ohgizmo on Twitter.

Christine Cube is a media relations manager with PR Newswire and freelance writer. She realizes she could use more gadgets and gizmos in her life and is currently working toward acquiring these bits o’ fun. Follow @cpcube or give her a shout at PR Newswire’s Google+.