Week 6, #14: Technorati

Technorati is the key to finding information in blogs--if you assume that finding information in blogs is a worthy activity. Yes, authority helps, but is authority a popularity contest or an accuracy measure? But that's a discussion for later.

When I searched initially, I included a quotation mark around my search string. Very librarian-like, right? I found nothing that way, in blogs or in blog posts. Removing the quotation marks changed the search, as it should. I guess sometimes you have to unlearn. I found 8 hits under blogs and 19 hits under blog posts. I expected to find more so I will need to review what I did and see what else I could/should have done.

I have used the ping aspect to add my blog to the technorati rolls, and added the HTML code for the tag. This is an interesting aspect of student blogging. If you had a blog for your class, say a book discussion blog, would you consider tagging it? My initial reaction is no for privacy reasons. If a student had a personal blog, he/she might want to tag it for technorati, but depending on the age of the student, that would definitely require plenty of parental dicussion.

The idea of having students use technorati to review election blogs is a great idea. Students could comment on the factual content, the structure of the argument presented, a comparison to traditional editorials, etc. Then they could create their own blogs. However, the blogs I saw doing a general search were very diverse. The teacher might want to use Technorati to find a list of blogs, or preapprove student blogs to keep the focus workable.

Looking at the top 100 blogs I was not surprised to see Huffington as number one. This blog has come closer to legitmizing blogging than any other blog. Another "unsurprise" is the number of technology blogs in the top 20. Tech geeks who blog would be the most likely to read technology blogs. I wonder how many of our computer teachers have their students read blogs?

Tagging is a mixed topic for me. The librarian in me likes the idea of search terms but the librarian in me (I can't help it!) feels frustrated by the lack of a controlled vocabulary. I wouldn't be surprised to see a controlled vocab in the future. After all, isn't that what is happening when the software shows you commonly used tags?

I did a search on Technorati and then put the same info into Google. If I did a general search with one or two search terms, the blog didn't appear. If I put very specific info in the google search, the blog did appear. Conclusion? Google can find the same info IF you already know the story, but otherwise not.

[School Library Learning 2.0]