Week 6 Thing 14: Technorati

OK, so I was prepared to be a little overwhelmed by this assignment. Technorati is a little overwhelming but once I got the hang of it, I really enjoyed putting in some cool search terms, or tags, and finding some interesting blogs. It was incredibly easy to put them onto my Google Reader site too. (Side note - I switched from Bloglines because I get interrupted too often and with Bloglines you have to save unread blogs or they disappear, with GR, they don't go away until you mark them as read.) I probably have too many to keep up with now, but I'll give it a try because the ones I've selected have some really great information on them. I liked all the different ways blogs can be found too - Top 100, most popular, different topics, top searches. It's a blogging dream. There's probably someone who reads it all and blogs about blogging.
As far as tagging goes, it's pretty much what we as librarians have been doing all along, we just call it cataloging. Back in the days when I did my cataloging "by hand", my main concern was "if I want my students to find this book, what are the best subject headings to use?" Then, I would get frustrated when Sears wouldn't have the exact term I wanted. That's a great thing about tagging - you put in whatever will make you remember the photo/site/blog. The biggest drawback with tagging is the beauty of cataloging - authority control. Even with my Delicious site I've used a couple different tags and it drives me nuts when I see that I have 7 sites under blog and 14 under blogs.
As far as claiming my blog and creating tags for it, I'm not ready for that yet. When I'm ready to blog about more than this class, that will be the time to do it but I'm glad I know how to get read. It's hard to write when you think no one is reading. Some of our CFF teachers are putting together a tech blog for the other CFF teachers and I'll be able to get that out there for others. I think the most intimidating thing is the HTML code but I will not let it beat me! They have a very good Technorati blog directory page.