Blogs are as similar as magazines. They vary based on point of view, motive for publishing, target audience, actual audience, depth of community involvement and content. In the Recruiting space there seem to be the following major categories:

• Blogs About Recruiting (ie the target audience is recruiters in general)
• Blogs That Do Recruiting (ie. the target audience is candidates in general)
• Blogs That Contain Useful Information For Recruiters (the target audience includes recruiters among others)
• Blogs That Contain Useful Information For Job Hunters (the target audience is candidates)

Pretty obviously, these categories break down a little further. For example,

• Blogs About Recruiting (Recruiters as Target Audience)
•     - Recruiting Techniques (How To Recruit)
•     - Sourcing Techniques (How to Find People)
•     - New Products, Services, Trends, Commentary (Punditry)
•     - Hubs (Collections of Bloggers)
•     - Recruiting Niches (Geographical or Industry Focus)
•     - Blogs By Recruiting Vendors (ATS Companies
• Blogs That Do Recruiting (Candidates as Target Audience)
•     - Company Specific Recruiting (Overall Branding)
•     - Department or Division Specific (ie Microsoft Marketing)
•     - Third Party Recruiters (Staffing or Executive Search)
• Blogs That Contain Useful Information For Recruiters (Recruiters are one part of the audience)
•     - HR Generalist Blogs
•     - Blogs For Specific HR Functions (Employment Law, Organizational Development, Training, Benefits, HRIS)
•     - Blogs By HR Vendors
•     - Blogs By Professional Associations
•     - HR Punditry
• Blogs That Contain Useful Information For Job Hunters
•     - Job Hunting Instructions and Advice
•     - Blogs That Review Job Hunting Tools
•     - Resume Creation, Packaging and Distribution

Authorship makes the whole question a little more difficult. If you read a company recruiting blog that is targeted at a specific category of potential employee and the author is writing about general recruiting techniques, you take the information in one way. If the author is the CEO of an ATS company writing about software platforms, you take it another way. Careful filtering based on authorship is useful when sifting through the information in blogs. Unfortunately, our current definitions of reputation are not very robust. That will change soon.

Frequency of posting also tells you something. Blogs are simply better when the material is fresh and regular. It's like produce in that way.

What do we do with these various categories? Tune in Monday.

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