Sunday, October 18, 2009

#14 - Week 6 - Taking the Fear Out of the Enormity of the Blogosphere

Technorati is a great site to help sort out and search the vast amount of blogs. Not just blog posts, which might as well be infinite, but blogs themselves, which number in the millions. I'd say that's a lot of information to keep track of and sort through, and it's only expanding, as 32 blogs are added to cyberspace every second . That's pretty intense.

I used the keyword "School Library Learning 2.0" and my results were very different. Under Blog Posts, I found 216,226 posts directly related to "School Library Learning 2.0." However, under Tags and Blog Directory I was unable to produce any related results. I don't think I was doing anything wrong - the procedure is pretty direct. I guess there aren't any tags or blogs with that exact phrasing.

When I looked through the most popular blogs, I wasn't exactly surprised that politics, technology, and entertainment - in that order - were the themes of the top 100 most searched blogs online. I was surprised that not one sports blog (ex: ESPN, Fox Sports) found itself in the top 100. My Dad will be happy that his favorite blog, powerlineblog.com, is in the top 50. I've checked it a couple of times, even though one of the contributors is a Blue, and as a member of the Red Half, I can't in good conscience condone that.

A searcher can find a ton of relevant information by effectively using tags to his or her advantage. However, as I mentioned in an earlier post, if a searcher is looking for a particular article or blog, tagging isn't going to aid in the search that much.

1 comment:

  1. great set of commentaries. Your point about misreading tags is key (even the word tag has several connotations). Good that you saw how different searches yield different results. And, yes, CC can be a real blessing in ed.

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