Week Six, Thing Fourteen

So there's way more to Technorati than I imagined. At first I just thought of it as a way to search RSS feeds but that is just one its more basic features, I suppose.

Today I played around with Technorarti's popular feature which delineates the top keywords users search, the top blogs favorited by readers, and blogs that have the most sites liking to them. Looking at the top searches is like being faced with a randomly weird cross-section of America: You see tech terminology, tech geeks, country music stars, tabloid celebrities, comic books and video games, popular websites, etc. I saw words that are deeply etched into popular culture and then words that are utterly meaningless and completely unkown to me.

I took a peek at some of the top 100 blogs favorited by Technorati users. In particular I explored 43 folders and Postsecret. Postsecret is more up my alley. It reminds me of the humor, creativity, and visual escape I used to find in Found Magazine.

Then I tried searching "Learning 2.0" in Technorati's blog posts, tags, and blog directory. I added the quotes because without them the search engine was adding an implicit or (vs. and) and giving me only half of the equation I was looking for. The results became more relevant and more centrally focused on learning 2.0 as I moved from searching blog posts, to tags, to uncovering blogs via the directory whose partial defining feature was blogging about learning 2.0. In searching "learning 2.0" I also discovered a lot of the blogs created by my coworkers as part of sjlibrary's 23 Things exercise. I even turned up my own blog which was a bit startling.

Part of the purpose of this lesson was think about tags, their advantages and disadvantages. So this is what I think right now at this specific moment: Tagging is an uncontrolled vocabulary which basically mearns that it's a mixed bag. Tagging allows each user to be as vague or specific, universal or idiosynchratic, terse or verbose as they wish. Some taggers may attempt to work in a shared vocabulary with others and some are more personal or obscure with their tags. Bu what level of description is best? I guess like everthing in life, it depends. It depends on the situation, intention, and needs of the user.