Banish Content Overload

By selecting all the feeds in your collection, then setting their filter to "great" - you'll be shown just the hottest posts from each blog. Selecting "best" will show you almost nothing at all, though. Once you've set the filter to Great, export this filtered version of your OPML file and move on to the next step!

Pretty Up Your Collection

We would recommend opening this new OPML file in your text editor and renaming it something more useful.

Check Out the Hotness

By clicking on any of the feeds you imported into Postrank, you can check out the hottest posts in that blog's recent history. Hello time saver! Some of you might be temped to call it a day at this point, and we have captured a lot of good intelligence with relatively little work - but don't stop now, there's more we can do! You'll want to take these next steps, too.

Import Into a Feed Reader

Go back to your Netvibes or other reader's "add a feed" page and you'll see the option to import an OPML file. Import your new Postrank.com filtered OPML file and you'll be subscribed to just the hottest posts from the best blogs in your field of interest. Oh but there's still more we can do!

Make a List of the Links You Found

There's a number of different ways you can do this, you could have made a separate list of your links before you subscribed to their feeds, but I didn't in this example. Instead I went into Netvibes, clicked on the title of each blog and copied its home page URL over to a list in a text editor. Why do you want this list of links? Check out the next step.

Make a Reference Search Engine!

Google Custom Search Engine is really easy to use and is an incredibly powerful tool. Just paste the list of all your top sources in your field into the box on the page, save it, then bookmark the URL of the resulting search engine. Now any time you want to look real smart on a topic in education, you can just search for keywords in your Top Education Blogs Custom Search Engine. We have a lot of different Custom Search Engines that we use here at ReadWriteWeb.

Finally, Discover Community Leaders Elsewhere, Too

Blogs are great, but they aren't the only place where important discussion is going on online - not in almost any field anymore. Thought leaders in the education blogosphere are also having a lot of conversation on Twitter and FriendFeed, they are uploading presentations to SlideShare and participating in other online communities. You can connect with them quickly and easily by using the Google Social Graph API. Martin Atkins has built a very handy little interface that anyone can use to discover social media accounts registered to a person's name. We use that daily.

In the example above, Dave Perry of Academhack mentioned his Twitter account, so we searched for his Twitter name in the Google People Search site and found his Slideshare account too. This will work better for some people than for others, but sometimes it's a really big help.

So there you go. If you follow these steps, you'll be able to discover the top bloggers in any field, view or subscribe to just their most popular posts, search against their archives and befriend them elsewhere around the web! We hope this has been useful. Thanks for following along. If you can suggest better steps to take at any point in this process, or additional things you like to do - we'd love to hear about it!