What Five Blogs Do You Read That Move The Needle?

Did you know that today is Blog Day?

According to the website:

"BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors. With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs."

This is, exactly, what I love about the Blog space: instead of hoarding and trying to build your own traffic, we create initiatives like this to drive traffic all over the place. In the spirit of the day, I thought it would be best to direct you to five Blogs that deserve way more traffic than they have (in no particular order):

1. hughmcguire.net by Hugh McGuire. Hugh is the founder of Librivox, earideas, datalibre and more. He’s one smart dude and has become a very good friend over the course of the past few years. He’s a fellow Montrealer who I meet-up with on a regular basis. I enjoy everything Hugh puts together and just wish that he would Blog even more frequently. His content is a mixture of personal musings, tech stuff, Internet culture, political thoughts, ideas about the future of publishing and more.

2. Pow! Right Between The Eyes by Andy Nulman. Andy is the guy who created the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival and after that he launched the very-successful, Airborne Mobile (where I worked for a short while back in the day). Andy’s Blog is one part marketing, one part comedy, and all the power of surprise in business. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s a former journalist or that he just happens to have a knack for Blogging, but I don’t ever miss a single post. I think he’s got one of the sharpest and most under-rated Blogs out there. In fact, this one post – Hot Wet Crotch – I think is one of the better Blog postings I have ever read.

3. One Mann’s Opinion by Kneale Mann. Kneale and I both hung out during my music industry days. He was a very high profile radio guy and I was a lowly music journalist type. While we had not seen or heard much from each other in the past fifteen years, we wound up connecting at a Geek Dinner in Ottawa this past year, and after that Kneale started Blogging. He’s got some deep thoughts that are well constructed and I enjoy his sense of humour. One Mann’s Opinion is, by far, my favourite of the newer Blogs on the block (note: I just noticed that Kneale listed me as one his top five for BlogDay 2008 – thanks for the nod Kneale. As you can see it’s a mutual admiration society).

4. The Praized Blog by Sebastien Provencher. Seb is one of the smartest thinkers I have ever met when it comes to the Internet. It’s only been a short while that we’ve been connected in person, but in that time, I’ve seen him go from being an executive at Yellow Pages Group to a Blogging, entrepreneur with his start-up, Praized. Seb has had some amazing posts over the past while, but what I love most about The Praized Blog is how he used it to create the entire platform and validation for his business model long before anyone knew what, exactly, Praized would be. If you’re looking for Blog content on Internet culture, new media, hyper-local, marketing and the publishing space, The Praized Blog is a must-read.

5. Awaken Your Superhero by Christopher S. Penn. Chris (I call him "Ninja") is one of the founders of PodCamp, he has a great Podcast called, Marketing Over Coffee, that is co-hosted with John Wall from The M Show and he also has a show for his current work gig, The Financial Aid Podcast. I put Chris’ Blog on this list because I think it gets overshadowed by his other works and it should not. He writes in a clear and passionate tone and I always have a fistful of smart marketing takeaways from each and every post. His Blog deserves your readership, so I hope you will stop in and give him a try.

What are some of your must-read Blogs that do not get a ton of traffic and that deserve some attention?

Today is the day for you to either share below or write your own Blog post to honour those who inspire you.