ScoutBlogs - the search begins

I've been on the lookout for interesting and useful Scouting Blogs (and web sites) and will be reporting on some of these in the near future.

There is a vast wealth of Scouting materials that can be found if one only looks. Scout related sites are reasonably well organized within the hierarchy of their country, region, and districts. Individual sites do a good job of cross-linking. And there are fascinating events, such as the Jamboree on the Internet (JOIT). Beyond this Scouters do not seem to have exploited other methods of linking and do not seem to be as well organized as some other groups on the Internet.

Other special interest groups organize in different ways, like:

• Webrings - these use a ring host database to provide next/previous and random jumps through the ring. The problem is that rings alone don't work for really large numbers of sites. And one thing about Scouting is that there will be a large number of sites!
• Blogging Networks - these aggregate like minded networks into a single feed. They're great ways for people to see the most current postings. But these too can become overwhelming. They are also designed as advertising channels. Like rings, this to fails to 'scale' up to the task of handling large numbers of sites.
  

As I add posts on this topic I will be cross-linking some of these sites from a new side section of the blog.

Update 1/31: I'd forgotten this post about using RSS/Atom feeds. Handy if you don't already know about them.