Monday, August 3, 2009

Thing #14 - Technorati with tags for blog posts

Whew! I don't think I'm ready for prime time Technorati. Searching the site wasn't all that friendly -- I tried several ways to search for "School Library Learning 2.0" and the results were incredibly varied. One search even gave two different results within a few minutes -- went from 84 results to 76. Is the blogosphere changing that rapidly that 8 blogs can be wiped out in minutes? At first the Tags search wasn't working at all. Also, one has to look at "any authority" versus "some authority", etc., in order to find results. I had to change to "any authority to get any results for Tags Only search. I'm not sure how helpful this is for a library. I think it's helpful for getting your blog out into the world -- I did find many of our CSLA bloggers there. Marie Slim's blog was amazing. How do you find the time???
Actually, my favorite result of this perusal was that the Huffington Post is the #1 Blog in Favorites or popular blogs. I thought that was interesting. Does it mean that it's mostly these types who read and write blogs? Or does it mean that people are interested in creating real dialogues about real problems? There are certainly a varied group of folks writing for Huffington Post which seems a good thing for information literacy. But would you recommend this as a source of information for your students? Not sure. As for tagging, it does seem critical. I never did access the list of 100 tags. I hope it works in future. I was curious that I got such strange results when I searched "education" -- none of the blogs were related to education. I clearly need more time with Technorati.

1 comment:

  1. Tagging IS crucial. I forget to do them and then wish I had. I need more time with Technorati too!

    ReplyDelete