Week 6, Exercise 14

Taking a closer look at Technorati today.

Item 1 - Searching for "Learner 2.0"
"in blog posts" brings up the reference in the body copy of blog posts
"in tags" brings up blog posts, videos and photos
"in blog directory" brings up blogs that use the term in the title

I would expect the blog directory results to be much more focused on the subject than those that just referenced it in blog posts.

Item 2 - Anything interesting or surprising...
Broad spectrum of content from trivial to thought-provoking. Here's a snapshot of what was popular today.

Top Tags This Hour:
Ann Coulter Australia Birthday cat Comedy Crazy Dance Dog Eclipse Entrepreneurship fashion girls HDTV House iPod Live Lyrics Money Paris Podcasting random-thoughts senza-categoria Singapore sports-living-travel-library Tecnologia VISTA Windows Vista wordpress world & business youtube

Top 100 Tags from A to Z:
(all languages)
Allgemein Apple Art Art and Photography Articles Automotive Blog Blogging Blogs book books Business Computers and Internet Culture Current Affairs daily days Design Diary dreams and the supernatural empty Entertainment Entretenimento Entretenimiento events Family fashion, style, shopping Film Food Friends Fun Funny Games goals, plans, hopes Google Health and wellness hobbies Humor Internet jobs, work, careers Journal Life Links Linux Love Música Marketing Media Misc miscellaneous MobLog Movie Movies movies, tv, celebrities Music Musique My Life Myspace News News and politics Noticias parties and nightlife Pasatiempos Personal Pets and Animals photo Photography Photos Podcast Poetry Politics Quiz random Religion Religion and Philosophy Reviews RO Romance and Relationships School school, college, greek Science software Sport Sports Survey Tech technology thoughts TOPICS Travel travel and places TV Video Videos Web Weblog Weblogs Work Writing Writing and poetry

The "Top Blogs" list had the Huffington Post at the bottom, followed by Techcrunch. I would have put them at the top - didn't really see the value of the others; maybe I'm not as interested in securing the latest gadget. Beaders do not seem to be heavy bloggers - a search for "beading" in the blog directory brought up quite a number who hadn't posted anything in the past month; still more who hadn't posted anyting in hundreds of days.

I didn't get to compare "Discover" to "Popular" because the latter view seemed to be all that was available.

Plusses and minusses of tags:
PLUS:
Assign a term that is meaningful to you
Quickly find material that has been assigned that topic

MINUS:
Doesn't always bring up what you associate with the word

Came across an interesting article on "Social Networking's Next Phase"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/03/technology/03social.html