Thing 14

Okay, I understand Technorati a little better after this exercise. I'm still not completely comfortable with it, but I do feel like I could use it effectively at this point. I thought it was interesting that out of the top 5 blogs listed by fans vs authority, there were three that appeared on both lists. I didn't expect to see such a high correlation between the two. I was also surprised to find that many of the top 15 searches related to topics unfamiliar to me. I noticed that when I clicked on the tag, 'phil bradley' I got hits for every blog that included each term separately, rather than the complete item. That should be corrected, I think. All in all, I think Technorati is a tool that I would like to introduce to my campus in hopes that it might encourage some of our teachers to get involved in the blogosphere. Personally, I may use it to find other blogs that pertain to my interest to replace some of the ones that I currently have on my Google Reader that may not be as useful as I first thought. Regarding tagging...I love the way that these little guys work! It's so great to be able to sort and find items according to the keywords that make sense to me. Of course, it becomes a little like assigning subject headings when it comes to finding information based on the tags of others. What made sense to them may not make sense to me and vice versa. I like the 'recommended tags' feature found on many of the sites we've explored, as that provides some order to the organization. I guess it's the librarian in me, but I feel like there should be some semblance of authority for all of these keywords, although I appreciate the freedom to use whichever tags I choose.

Thing 9

I've spent several days looking at some of the blog search tools and although I found the Google search to be the easiest to use, I prefer finding blogs through the recommendations of others. Not necessarily word-of-mouth, but more a word-of-blog-ticker method. Almost every library-related blog that I visited had Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk blog in their list, so I subscribed to it as well. I think that it says something (hopefully something good!) when a blog has as large an audience as Doug Johnson's does. I did find an amusing blog about mothering preschoolers using Technorati, but I found that tool somewhat difficult to navigate....it was not clearly evident to me how to go about getting to the actual blog so that I could subscribe. I thought it was interesting that on Suprglu the vast majority of the posts came from Doug Johnson's blog. Maybe I just caught it at an unusual time. The most entertaining feed that I found was one called 'Love the Liberry' that recounts some of the amusing interactions that occur between public librarians and their patrons. Maybe I should start something like that for school librarians....