Resource hunting

I've kind of been wondering about how to go about starting the practical business of reading as the internet is such a vast and craziliy huge thing. I was told to just jump in and start reading some blogs, but I thought it might be helpful in the long run to look at what sort of stuff is already out there about blogging, so I turned to my favorite source, Wikipedia. Unluckily for me, this did not serve too well to narrow things down, but did give me some background and sites that might be helpful, like

Technorati - for finding blogs to look at by searching, as opposed to randomly clicking around for hours and hours.
Diarist.net- a site that seems sort of outdated/ old, but might serve well for historical findings and catalyst for finding other, similar, newer message board type things that people actually still use.
Open Diary History Project - something I may be able to use to make contact with the open diary world, or at least learn more about why people actually started doing this (in a personal way, rather than in a theoretical, pomo way).
(Side note: Do I have to explain what things are if they are hyperlinks? I mean, I guess I just don't expect that people will click on every single one just because I put them there, so I feel compelled to warn people what they are getting into.)

It seems as though blogging as a media has sort of boomed like nuts over the last 3-4 years as a media outlet, and had more of a heyday in terms of the sort of personal blog thing that I am interested in around 2000 (what with LiveJournal, Xanga, and Blogger, of course). I mean, people obviously still write personal blogs, but today the general area of focus when it comes to blogs, blogging and bloggers seems to be on them in terms of how they interact with mainstream media and as advocacy journalism, proliferation of political commentary, and the personal publishing aspect. So it seems that I am a little late in terms of what is fashionable at this particular moment, (just like with cyberpunk... dang) but since things on the internet apparently never die (or at least they don't if they existed before about 2000) I don't think I'll have a problem finding a lot of stuff to look at. How I will sift through it all... any suggestions?

Also, I've been doing my personal best to tell everyone I know that this exists, in order to fully embrace this public medium and make it as much a collaborative text as anything else out there on the internet. I think I may even resort to putting it up on facebook, but at this point I think I will stop short of e-mailing the link to literally everyone I know. Though it has just begun, please tell other people you might know about it, in case it might be interesting.