The grammatical construction of 比较有名的开始
You got it: “starting from relatively famous schools”. This is not great written Chinese tho, it's more like spoken Chinese written down - I wouldn't read too much into it. You already know what it should be, you wrote it above: 从比较有名的开始. 有名的 is referring to the schools here.


  So is it OK to omit the preposition in these cases? Or grammatically not correct but nonetheless commonly used, especially in these blog posts? It is still a bit difficult to make a transition from a rigorous textbook Chinese to a live sentence used on the Web... -@Blaszard


Yeah, especially when Chinese makes such a large distinction between written (书面语) and oral (口语) language. Day-to-day speech is basically a free for all. Sometimes you'll even hear words like 其实 or 而且 at the end of sentences almost like an after thought. As for your 从 preposition here, yeah you can drop it here, but in written language it is always better to keep it.