Thing #14: Technorati

Technorati strikes me as another one of those "Man, wish I'd thought of that!" ideas. It's filtering the blogosphere through tags, popularity, and authority.

After watching this video, I understood it more fully. I realized just how important the blogosphere has become in recent years with regards to news, technology, and popular culture. A popular blog or tag, as the Technorati staffers explain, indicates that those with "real world perspectives" think it is important, aka worth blogging about.

The authority concept is important. It's interesting how a blog's level of authority is determined on Technorati: the more people who link to your blog, the more authority it has.

In searching "School Library Learning 2.0" in blog posts, I got 0 results. This same search in the blog directory gave me lots of results. And, interestingly enough, this same search in tags turned up lots of Library 2 Play blogs!

I think that the tagging concept combined with authority make the blogosphere very classroom-relevant. Like one of the staffers in the video said, you'll be able to read about events that would never appear on the evening news. How awesome would it be to enlighten young minds with some of these discoveries?! I was encouraged to see that the top searches included "news" and "environment" (albeit being accompanied by "Paris Hilton" and "Vanessa Minnillo").

I can't get over that the top tags included "blog", "blogging", and "weblog". Please explain...is the blogosphere that self-absorbed (and blogging about blogging), or are blog posts by default receiving these tags?