Friday, August 3, 2007

Week 6 - Thing 14 - Technorati

The exposure to all these sites and concepts is great! I must admit I'm a little overwhelmed with new ideas, but that's a good thing.

I finally realized that in order to do the keyword search for "School Library Learning 2.0" in the various areas, Blog posts, tags and Blog directory, it was necessary to use the "advanced" search mode. Apparently the drop-down menu next to the search box, referenced in the Technorati Tour video is only available in logged-in mode. Of course the results are different. It was quite fun to see our our blogs come up in the Technorati search.

By searching Blog posts, I got 1729 results, most of them from our own CSLA participants. It made me feel right at home. Results are listed by the most recent posts, and by clicking, you go to the actual blog page. I did notice that if you go down to about page 3 or 4, you start coming across seemingly random generated words in a blog that bring you to a page of advertisements, not a bona fide blog. But by far, searching Blog posts yields the most hits.

Searching tags, I came up with 3 blog posts and some visual media. Apparently it would require someone using "School Library Learning 2.0" as a tag in order to be located by Technoriti's search function. Fewer of us have used that more cumbersome tag.

The blog directory resulted in 7 results. When you click on one of them, you get a sampling of the blog along with a link to the actual blog.

Looking for a "popular" blog. Hmmmmm. There are thousands of blogs out there that are of no interest whatsoever to me. It's actually quite fascinating to see what people do with their time (I should talk...) and what grabs their attention. Looking at the list of popular blogs, I am left a little cold. They are predominantly about extreme high technology or rabid politics. So I decided to start from the bottom of the list and search up. Aha. I settled on this one. Ths author just seems to be a down-to-earth ordinary person, with some tech skills, no doubt. She makes comments on her daily life and what is going on in the greater world. This is probably a little ho-hum for most of you, but I found it to be less demanding than most. Simply a slice of life.

Thoughts about tagging: Tagging is powerful. We librarians who deal with subject headings all the time know how important they are for indexing. Those of us who have been tempted to create our own subject headings and divert from Minnie Sears should be thrilled by the opportunity to go wild and create tags that are meaningful to us. However, we need to rely on our training with standard subject headings to try to keep those tags fairly mainstream so that they will be useful.

Beelerspace's article on flat hierarchies was interesting. However I'm not sure I entirely "get it" yet.

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