Thing 14 - Technorati

Technorati is interesting. I like the idea of a search engine for blogs, because as was expressed in the video, blogs are the "voice of the people." This is the grassroots. And I increasingly understand the value of popularity, and in the Technorati world, popularity in the case of blogs seems to lend a little more "authority" to them. I did a search for "Library Learning 2.0" in tags (3), blogs (61), and posts (38), which illustrates how tagging affects search results. Each Thing is building my knowledge. I think I might look at the social bookmarking sites a little differently now, because I understand a little more about the value of popularity. This points out that you might want to use some of the "recommended tags" in addition, or especially, if your own tag is a little esoteric. I guess, however, I still value tagging mostly for its search and discovery aspect - tags make information more "findable." I can see that advertisers could take advantage of tags to target ads. Also, it is interesting to me how different sites take advantage of tags - the tags on Delicious definitely help you find information, yet the tags on Flickr did not seem as beneficial to a search. I could not "re-find" the photos I had found before. Perhaps their search engine needs to utilize tags better. Learning, learning - I found Technorati a lot more useful in this Thing than I did when I first encountered it in Thing 9.