Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Week 6: Exercise 14, Technorati and Tags

I searched "School Library Learning 2.0" under the searches suggested and came up with the following observations:
Posts - Actual posts from people regarding the 2.0 assignments and other non-related School Library Learning 2.0 posts - Search resulted in 1060 blog posts
Tags -Tags are highlighted in the posts. When I searched again putting quotations around "School Library Learning 2.0" I then received relevant postings from the 2.0 group. Tags are very important.
Blog Directory - You get the actual blog websites of people - Search resulted in 10 blogs. When I put quotation marks around the topic, the results were 5 relevant blog sites related to the 2.0 group.

Popular Searches:
Blogs - Ranked according to how many people have added the blog to their Favorites and according to how many times it has been linked to
Top Searches - Posts and blogs of all the most popular things that are in the news or the latest rage--YouTube, iPhone, Paris Hilton --Who has time for all of this?
Tags - The music, videos, movies, games, DVDs, news, and blogs that people are talking about right now. They are rated by how many links have been made in Amazon.com, YouTube, Internet Movie Database, etc.
I found it very interesting that we don't know how good these popular posts/sites/reviews are, only that people are linking to them, so that must mean they are authoritative/reputable. HA! Of course, I was interested in the Movie postings.
These popular searches are a fun way to learn about the popular culture of today and to keep up with those teenagers!

I really like tagging. I can see why students would like it also. Using Sear's or Library of Congress subject headings causes you to think about the "proper" way of cataloging items, but tagging is much freer and can use key words that most people would use to search. However, you need to be very careful in using quotation marks around specific searches as seen in "School Library Learning 2.0" or you will get some irrelevant results. I especially like tagging in Del.icio.us. What a time saver!

I was able to tag this post with a Technorati tag, created a link for others to save my blog to their Favorites. and I claimed my blog. I haven't created a watchlist yet, but I think that will be very beneficial.

1 comment:

IrmaPince said...

Wow! You are going to town with this project - and on a holiday too. Hope you know that some of those fireworks were set off in you honor.