Week 6, #14

I just spent hours exploring Technorati. Glad there is such a thing, though with 50 million blogs out there, the vastness of it is overwhelming. I experimented with searching--first, I used the "search the blogosphere" bar and entered School Library Learning 2.0. Though some of the results were relevant, many were not. So, I went to Advanced Search and typed in the exact phrase and got 0 results. I tried using the phrase "library 2.0" and just "2.0" and was interested to see the difference in the results. On the advanced page, you can search by tags and those results were more relevant. However, as I learned from reading the Technorati information, one must register and of course, add tags if blogs are to show up there! I wonder how many bloggers actually add tags.

I follow a couple of blogs, one of which is my 89 year-old mother's blog. I entered the name of her blog in the search bar and the result was 6 bloggers who mention her blog. It surprised me that her blog would not come up as one of the results. Am I missing something?

I spent time looking at some of the top 100 blogs and was fascinated by the diversity of them. Boing Boing which came out at the top covers a wide range of topics. Many of the top 100 are technology oriented, which makes sense. Looking at the "top searches" list was interesting too--the majority seem to be either about Hollywood people or technology. One was for news. One could spend hours looking at these results.

I think tags are important. Though there is no controlled list of tags (like the concept of Library of Congress' subject headings), tags reflect the way we are trying to teach our kids the idea of keywords and brainstorming possible ways to find information. We try to teach them that they should think of multiple ways someone could classify information. I think showing kids the lists of tags that show up on Technorati would be a great lesson. Again, though, I think it will be awhile before most bloggers add tags so it does limit the results of a tag search.