Technorati

So I gave Technorati a whirl. It seems to do its job well. I tried searching "web 2.0" in all three categories, but I've got to tell you that it is such a big topic that I couldn't really interpret much from the differences.

So to really see how this works, I searched the name of a blog that is eponymous with its author. Her writing has been controversial of late, and I got a very good idea of how this all works.

So I first looked in the blog directory and I found nothing, though she is a popular blogger. She must not have registered her blog with Technorati.

Then I looked in blog posts, and I found over six thousand posts about the blog and blogger. But I still couldn't find her own blog posts. Interesting.

Then I searched the tags. Photos from her Flickr account came up along with many of her blog posts mixed in with others that tagged her name.

What I am seeing is that alot of people are wasting alot of time writing about flame wars within the blogosphere. I'm also seeing that Technorati allows me to research what bloggerers have to say about people, politics and other bloggers. I can track themes, which isn't personally interesting, but for anyone who is researching a topic in real time, or trying to discern a new trend or trying to keep track of new innovations, this is a terrific tool. Librarians can use this to help people achieve these goals. We can also use it to follow library current library trends.


Now I'm going to try the same thing with "kcls27things". KCLS is impacting the blogosphere. "kcls27things" is the number 10 search term at this point in time. So we're skewing the results. It seems as though a small group of people could wreak some havoc with Technorati if they wanted to. Also at least one blogger is commenting on kcls27things being on this top ten list. This person called it an "A-List Blog" So now we are A list!

Anyway, I checked tags and saw the Flickr photos, etc. This is all very interesting and I'll need play with it more to really understand it's impact.

By the way, the original blog is called Althouse.