Thing #14

I hadn't heard the statistic about the number of blogs doubling every 6 months! It makes me wonder how many actually endure. A lot of folks who use the service where I have my personal blog will write for a couple of months, enjoy the novelty, and then let them lapse. Some folks have more than one blog for different things like my buddy L. She has a personal blog, a writing blog, and a research blog. That would be an interesting study!


I consider myself a fairly internet savvy person. Not an expert by any means, but not a newbie either. Technorati overwhelms me. I think it's the sheer amount of stuff: search options, live updated blog feeds, user ratings, authority, tags, recommended search terms, popular blogs...and it's all right there smooshed into the main page, hitting me in the face all at once. I think I've gotten used to the simplicity of google. Logo followed by search box. Technorati is something I'm going to have to play with more, after completing this exercise, to truly feel comfortable with it.


When I did my "learning 2.0" search in posts, I got just that. Individual posts that mention learning 2.0 in the text, some of them on blogs like ours - individuals going through a learning 2.0 course (although, some only mentioned it in passing in an otherwise unrelated post). It was interesting to see how similar and different other L2.0 courses are from ours.


Searching in tags got similar results as the "posts" search, but the entries had been tagged with learning 2.0, so the results were a little bit more consistent.


Searching the directory got blogs dedicated to the subject of learning 2.0. Our lpls blog was #10 on the list!


There wasn't one blog on the "Top Favorited Blogs" list that I regularly read. Taking the list as a whole, it was easy to see the type of person who regularly uses Technorati. There was a disproportionate amount of tech, gadget, and hacker blogs. My favorite title had to be Kahlee's Blog: Never Give a Cheerleader a Keyboard. And I shouldn't have been surprised that there's a whole site dedicated to lolcat humor called icanhascheezburger.

I found it interesting that some of the most popular searches included Google, Yahoo, and Facebook, and I wonder if "searches" referred to the amount of content provided by these sites during other searches, searches for these sites (which seems kind of silly to me because one normally goes to google or yahoo to search for things), or a combination of elements.

I would consider this the least pleasurable Thing we've done so far. It seems a little too complicated for my every day needs, although it's good to know about Technorati if I need to do a more specialized search.