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

Week 6, Exercise 13

I found the SJLearning del.icio.us site a bit overwhelming. Found that I understood the concept a better when I did my own search on a topic that interested me personally, which is marketing jewelry. Can certainly see the benefit of using compound tags to drill down specifically to what you want. "How to" gives you how to do everything in the universe, but "How to" + marketing + jewelry is far more productive. Clicking on tags another user assigned to the article is more likely to bring up other useful links than clicking on the other user. Found an online beading magazine that I bookmarked and I'll definitely be going back to explore more of the sites brought up by others tags for that site. Just for the heck of it, I googled the same string of words. The results were less useful overall, so I can definitely see the benefit of piggybacking on the sifting through the unnecessary or useless sites that someone else has already done. Seems only fair to share in turn.