Saturday, July 7, 2007

Thing 14: Discovering Technorati and Learning How Tags Work with Blogs

Technorati is a type of search engine that searches for keywords in blogs. The blogosphere currently has about 51 million blogs and it is doubling every 6 months! That is "astounding"! Technorati is a publishing tool that is being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries. Technorati will pick up tags when it crawls the web. A blogger must "claim" their blog, thereby establishing authorship of the blog. Then set up a Technorati account and increase visibility of the blog. A Watchlist creates a customized report about the topics you care about and is available via a RSS feed.

Discovery Exercise:
1.Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?
24,088 blog posts about learning 2.0
813 blog posts about learning2.0 (no space)
481 blogs about learning 2.0
68 blogs about learning2.0 (no space)
Even videos on learning 2.0

2.Explore top favorited blog, top searches and top blogs. Is anything interesting or surprising?
1. Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things
2,245 members have made this a Favorite
2. Make Money Online ProBlogger Blog Tips
1,734 members have made this a Favorite
Surprising: There are people who are full time bloggers. There are those who sell their blogs. Someone made $155,000 selling his!
3. Techcrunch
1,637 members have made this a Favorite

No comments: