Week 8, Thing 15: Technorati

15. Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts.

Well, I played around with Technorati but I really don't think it's anything I'd use for my work in an elementary school library. I might occasionally find a reason to search for blogs on a specific topic, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. I clicked around and checked out the photos and the tag clouds and all that stuff, but I just couldn't work up any real enthusiasm for it. I'm not sure if it was the fact that I couldn't foresee a use for it or that I wasn't really keen on the look of the pages, or both.

To test out the searching, I decided to look for something not related to school and see what came up if I searched both Technorati and Google Blogs. I figured I'd check out knitting blogs to see if I could find an interesting pattern that I might want to try out. I'm only an occasional knitter but I have noticed in the past that a lot of folks seem to blog about what they have been knitting and they share photos of finished projects as well as patterns (for free -- woo hoo!) For both knitting and one other topic I searched, I found some interesting things and did about as well on the Google Blogs search as the Technorati one. And when I found something I wanted to keep track of, well I tagged it in Del.icio.us, of course.

As suggested, I tried the advanced search and put the web address of my blog in the URL search box. No results. But I tried the URL for Vermont's 23 Things blog and found that there are 19 "blog reactions" or blogs that link to it. I poked around a few of those blogs and read a few things and ended up finding some very entertaining videos promoting National Library Week.

I didn't bother to "claim my blog" on Technorati. I mean, who is really going to go looking for it, other than people who already have access to the link from the participant page for Vermont's 23 Things? (And maybe my daughter, who can stalk my blog easily now that I've showed her how to use RSS feeds.)