Week #6 Thing #14

I was really skeptical about Technorati after reading some of the posts. Actually, it didn't seem too bad if you are really into reading Blogs.

After clicking on the link to Technorati I discovered I had won a free computer and the opportunity for brain seizures ... don't you love those flashing ads that just won't go away? Well, I guess that's how they keep it free.

Also on the first page when it opened it I discovered that "Elizabeth Dole says %&*@!! to Americans Who Died From Aids." Reminds me why I don't search these type of sites at school and how Wiki's look like the Harvard Medical Journal compared to Blogs...

I don't know if it's because I use Mozilla, but the little video "Technorati Tour - Videocast of New features and Look" (under Discovery Resources) shows a totally different interface than the Technorati link I clicked on which apparently shows the "Old features and Look." Regardless, I was able to use the advanced search and navigate around to view the required Blog posts, Tags, Blog Directory for "School Library Learning 2.0" Remember the quotation marks in your search. Also, if you don't get any hits on tags change the search to include "any authority." I did see a variety of posts using the different searches, interestingly enough many expressing the sort of Technorati Shell Shock I've seen in the Raven About Web 2.0. I was reminded that I enjoy checking out Boing Boing once in awhile for fun.

Did anyone else notice that the lady in the Videocast said she visits the "My Favorites" page of Technorati seven (or several?) times a day to see updates to her favorite Blogs? I think I'd list that right there with EverQuest and W.O.W. for internet addictions.

I passed on the optional activity of tagging my blog for Technorati. There was just something about the phrase "Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site" that gave me the heebie-jeebie's. It's kind of like dust mites, I know they're there, but I don't want to think about it.

Now on Tags: One of the Blog posts I saw in Technorati said that as a cataloging tool tags are only good if created correctly. Absolutely. That said, I love tags! I have been using them for awhile now. Gmail calls them "labels," but they are basically "tags." And of course LibraryThing which we'll cover later and I jumped ahead to earlier uses tags. Every time an application calls for tags I find them useful. It's like infinite file boxes and you can easily put copies of the data in as many boxes as you like. It's a whole different way to visualize organization and I love it. (I'm an organization nut by nature, obviously!)