Saturday, January 17, 2009

Week 6, #14

I search for “School Library Learning 2.0” in Technorati and was not happy with the results. I don’t find their search as effective as some other searches and search-engines. I never found the “School Library Learning 2.0” blog by doing a basic search on Technorati. But I did register my blog on Technorati and become a member. I found out that I had an authority of 4 meaning that 4 different blogs have linked back to my blog in the last few months. I was pretty impressed that link-backs are what give you an authority rating and if the Technorati site can be believed I should see more hits on my blog simply because I registered it. We will see. I was also amazed that I could not find Joyce Valenza’s blog using the basic search on Technorati. I have to explore their advanced search more. So far I am not impressed but I was able to find the “School Library Learning 2.0” blog when I did a search using Technorati’s “exact phrase” button. For me I think this is the way to go. I tend to remember the names of my friend’s blogs or basically remember the names. It may be better to me to search for the exact phrase most of the time.

To try to find some links for the Inauguration I did a search on the word and found a satire blog site.  I will keep looking for some sites to use with my students.

I have written about Internet tags several times on this blog and my opinion has not changed much. I guess my basic dislike of tags is my own fault, I am not a very organized person as a rule and I tend to forget how I tagged things before. In previous posts on my blog or on sessions on del.icio.us I may tend to use one tag and then the next time I use something different. I am starting to wonder if it would help me to start tagging things by Dewey Decimal Number rather than by words that I will forget the next time.

4 comments:

Cathy Jo Nelson said...

Technorati is nice to know about and can be useful from time to time, but the authority/rank info is highly questionable. As for Joyce Valenza's blog, I think hers doesn't get rated or tracked by Technorati b/c its buried in the SLJ site, and their blogging platform in my opinion is weak (no feed for comments,which I think is the most valuable feed second to the feed for posts--to allow those who use readers to follow threaded conversations that occur in blogs.) I have voiced this to SLJ, but no change has been made. So even tho I read their blogs I think of them as "wannabe" blogs that are not quite there yet. Technorati has a STRANGE way to assign rank/authority too, and so as time elapses, the 4 links to your blog may be deemed by Technorati as too old, therefore causing you to lose authority (so unfair.) Also the more authority the blog has that linked to you, the higher your score is. Those who have such an amazingly high authority are lining to each other either through blog posts, comments on each others blogs, or pingbacks on each other (and even themselves as they blog and refer back to their older posts in a pingback) making it grossly unfair here too. (This is classic echo chamber speak as well.) Also, there are many spam blogs that provide pingbacks that are basically false links, and these questionable links falsely raise authority on the notion that the more linking to your blog, the more authority you have. Take technorati authority with a grain of salt. It's nice to see it grow, as it does somewhat stroke the ego a little, but the algorithms that determine authority or rank are not clearly defined and somewhat unfair. I know this was a way to learn about the site/program in the 23 things, but the best way to find blogs to read is see who the bloggers you do read list in their blogrolls. Just my opinion.

Congerjan said...

Thanks Cathy,
I knew I could count on you to let me understand Technorati aggregation in a new way. I was wondering how they came up with their authority score. I have used Technorati before and didn't like it much and gave up on it. I only re-visited it because of the 23 things. So, now that Technorati is as clear as mud, I can tell you that I do most of my blog reading from my blog roll... and from links on Twitter. I still like Twitter a lot. I think it is one of my favorite places to go for professional development, plus I can read and comment from my iPhone.

Cathy Jo Nelson said...

So now that you know how I read, add the comments feed (In your blogger dashboard).

Congerjan said...

I am not sure I know what you mean. I do allow comments, I just monitor them because I was getting a lot of spam comments.