Thing #14: Technorati and How Tags Work

Now that you have been working with blogs for awhile, it is time to look at a search engine that is specifically for searching blogs for their content. That would be Technorati, a portmanteau (or morphing) of technology and literati or intellectuals. as of August, 2007, it has indexed over 84 million blogs.

There are a lot of features in Technorati including the capability to search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, limit a search by language, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like book reviews or libraries).

Background information:
1. View the blog from Technorati. View the tags used to categorize the information included in the posts.
2. Watch this video of the leadership at Technorati talking about their "product."

3. Read this blog post that discusses tags and tagging in things like Technorati, de.licio.us, amazon.com, and the effect it is having on advertisers.


Discovery activities:
1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “School Library Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
3. Create a blog post for Thing #14 and express your thoughts regarding how Technorati and its features could assist you. Since you have now looked at several tools that use tagging (Technorati, de.licio.us, & Flickr), add your thoughts about the value of tagging information

Optional:
1. Register and claim your blog. It will increase the traffic that visits your blog.
2.Explore the various Technorati widgets that you could add to your blog.

Tag was a fun childhood game...hope tagging has now become a fun "learning" tool!

P.S. Did you realize you are 2/3 of the way through the 23 Things? Yipee!!
Have you taken a look at some of the other Players' blogs, read some of their posts, and commented? Please be sure you comment to some of the thoughts expressed by your fellow Players...commenting is an important part of the interactive web world!