I will be the first to admit I read too many blogs. My RSS Reader is consistently over the 1000+ mark and I probably know too much about too many things I really have no business trying to understand. But then, there are a lot of smart people out there with good information to share.

I wanted to share some of my favorites with you, should you be looking for more blogs to fill your coffee breaks.

Small Business Matters on the Business.gov website

Damsels In Success: Professional Women Blogs

Small Business Trends: Anita Campbell and guest authors

Duct Tape Marketing: John Jantsch, guru, author of Duct Tape Marketing and Palo Alto’s Marketing Plan Pro software

Diva Marketing Blog: Toby Bloomberg’s savvy and sassy advice

The Marketing Minute: Drew McLellan, marketer and author

Customer’s Rock: Becky Carroll rocks out on the best of customer experience

Church of the Customer: Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba – They’ve also started a great Ning site Society for Word of Mouth

Social Media business strategy and more: Chris Brogan

TED: Ideas worth spreading

PR-Squared: Social Media and Public Relations

There are obviously more, as I said, I have a very long list …  but these are my first stop blogs every morning.

What are yours?

‘Chelle Parmele
Palo Alto Software

As someone who does a lot of researching for topics to blog about, not only for myself but the rest of the people who kindly donate their time to write on the Business in General blog, I do a lot of reading every day. I have dozens of RSS feeds in my Google reader, I compulsively click links from people in Twitter, and I visit Alltop.com religiously.

Alltop.com is the brainchild of Guy Kawasaki. BTW, we’re big fans of Guy at Palo Alto Software, so much so, we persuaded him to let us include his book The Art of the Start with our Business Plan Pro software.

But getting back to Alltop.com. Alltop is a mishmash of hundreds of different blogs out in the interwebs, all contained in neat categories for you to keep track of. They define it as the “digital magazine rack” of the internet.

Looking for a blog about “Do it yourself“? How about “Design” or even my favorite “Small Business“. It’s all there. The feeds give you a quick look at headlines and if you hover over the headline you get a snapshot of what the post is about.

This is awesome. I’m not kidding. I would say I get new information or find a new blog there almost every time I look.  So my recommendation for your afternoon is spending a bit of time exploring the categories of Alltop. You’ll find some great new blogs and fantastic ideas and information from some of the top bloggers out there.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

P.S. My cool find today was the blog at ZURB. Great article on “Why are store hours so small?” Well worth a read for those ‘brick and mortar’ businesses out there.