Thing #14

Oops, I kinda slacked these past few weeks, but I WILL get this Learning 2.0 done by next Friday! Anyways, on to Thing #14.
The beauty of Web 2.0 is that anyone with a computer (and who knows a bit about how to use it) can publish their own content, whether it's a silly video, political blog, cooking podcast, etc. However, while there is certainly no lack of information out there, it can easily get overwhelming to even find the type of thing we're looking for. With 62.5 million blogs out there, we need tools like Technorati to sift through and make sense of it all. I watched the Technorati tour, and I appreciate the fact that Technorati is striving to make the site more accessible to the average user, not just avid bloggers.

Searching for Learning 2.0 in the blog posts proved to be pretty inefficient because it just scans the text of the entry for either Learning or 2.0, and not necessarily even together as a phrase, even with "Learning 2.0" with quotations. I'm guessing the search algorithims aren't very advanced. However, I quickly saw the importance of thorough and descriptive tagging, because when I did a Learning 2.0 search in tags, while it brought up much fewer results, overall they seemed much more relevant. This is because an actual person has actually taken the time to "catalog" their post so that others can find it. The problem I see with this, due to my librarianey background, is the lack of a controlled vocabulary. Someone might tag something as one thing while the other person might search for it under another thing. I suppose we gotta cut the average person some slack, though, and just let them do the best they can with tagging. I think that inconsistent tagging is better than no tagging at all, because it provides yet another method to find what we're looking for. The search in the blog directory also yielded some pretty good results as well. I even found some SJPL blogs in there.
While poking around at other stuff in the popular blogs, I came across a few that I like, such as PostSecret, where people can anonymously post any secret, and Make Magazine, which is a cool DIY magazine (and blog!) with ideas for all kinds of neat gadgets and projects. Technorati still seems mostly dominated by the techie crowd, since most of the "Top Favorited" blogs were tech-related.

I took the challenge and tagged this entry as "SJLibrary2.0" with Technorati. I also tagged this entry within Blogger, which I've been lazy about.

SJLibrary2.0