Week #6, Thing #14-Technorati

I went to Technorati yesterday and it was there that I began following the story of Hillary Clinton accepting the job as secretary of state...it is now a day later and I have yet to hear anything about this story through the US News...so what does that tell me? Blogs are cool and dangerous. Apparently one newspaper and only one, in England reported this story...so is it true? I still don't know. However, Technoroti is set up so that it is very user friendly. I was impressed with the headlines of "rising posts and stories" and I like the "Today in Photo" feature.

So I went back today...after adding it to my Del account and Furl accounts and did my search for "School Library Learning 2.0". What I learned was that when I did a keyword search, I only received 5 results and they ranged from 204-106 days old...very old in the world of blogs. When I did a search in Blog posts, I got 57. I found no post in the tag search and in the Blog directory I had to click on Technology and "go down" to web 2.0...and found 7 pages.

I really liked the feature they have on finding popular blogs and how it was organized by te number of fans for each...that was useful info. I was a little "frightened" by the popular searches, out of the top ten, 4 were for femal actresses...that makes me wonder... As for searching by tags...no one used the school library learning 2.0 as a tag. For one, I think its way too long. I think of tags as being short and sweet.

I like tagging. As I get older and realize just how old I am, (working with teens does that) I find that the language I used is not "hip" anymore. I think each generation has their own "language" and tags allow us all to use that uncommon lang. I also like tags because it is NOT as complicated as LCSH. I students come in the library and search the catalog for "Spanish food"...not cooking or even spanish cooking, but spanish food...this is the lang they use and we need to find a way to mesh the various types of word usage and language together. But the downfall is that we simply don't use the same language. So someone needs to be able to work between the two and and that's where we, the librarians come in. We are the middle people, we work with all types of people, groups and so on. We are needed and I think tagging is a great example of that need...