Week 6, Thing 14

Discovery Exercise:
1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “School Library Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?
Results
Posts - 3
Blogs - 19

When I searched in advanced in searched in tags, I came across the same three post, same blogs listed as well. I came across no results when I searched in quotes.

2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

It was interesting to see "Education" as one of the top searches. When I checked out some of the blogs, for example, "ShoeMoney," I didn't even see "Education" listed in its tags. ShoeMoney is a blog/diary from a person who makes a living online. It contains thoughts and opinions based on real live experiences....it seems like a stretch, but maybe it's educating the people about how to make a living online???

Many of the top blogs were related to technology. For example, Boing Boing is a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It's the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com, and won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony. The next top blog was one about making money off of your blog.

It's a little interesting to see what is "popular" right now on the web in videos, books, news, games, etc. I came across "Bert & Ernie tries Gangsta-Rap"....I had to check it out since I grew up with Sesame Street. What I found amazing what how this person edited old episodes of Bert and Ernie to a rap song and it matches nicely with the movement of the puppets! Sometimes the things people can do with technology amazes me!

3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.

Done!!

4. Now that we’ve worked with tags in Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Technorati, what are your thoughts about tagging? What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages?

Tagging has its benefits - you can find related items on the web to what you are looking for. However, it is sometimes up to the person to choose how to tag an item, which may or may not be relevant in your opinion. In my own blog, I could make up tags if I wanted that might now have anything to do with what you are looking for. Tagging reminds me of how I do google image searches - not all the photos are related to what I am looking for so I have to spend time to "weed" through the material to find what I am looking for...that is what I feel about how tagging works. In facebook, they offer tagging as well...in photos! In a way it keeps track of where your photos are in other people's albums, or your own.