Thing 4 -- Technorati

So now that you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering just how big is the blogosphere? Well according to San Francisco based Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, there are “over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.” Technorati currently tracks 112 million blogs. Yes, these numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries. There are a lot of features in Technorati including the capability to search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, limit a search by language, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).

Homework Activities:

• Take a look at Technorati Search and try doing a keyword search for library related topics in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Search for libraries, school libraries, library 2.0, and other search terms. Are the results different?
• Explore popular blogs, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
• Explore the sections such as Politics, Front Page, and Technology. How could you use this in your personal searches? ...searches for library related content?
• Find some interesting blogs on this site (i.e. library sites, technology sites, etc.). Favorite a few. Add some of them to your Bloglines account if they are something you'd like to read on a regular basis.
• Create a blog post, on your blog, about your discoveries on this site. "Thing #4 -- Technorati".

If you want more (optional, advanced):

You may be interested in blogging after we are done with our class; perhaps on something you like such as gardening, quilting, etc. So how do you get your blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you’re already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But if you want to join the party and have your blog officially listed on Technorati and also take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you’ll need to claim your blog yourself.

As for tagging posts with Technorati tags? This is easy too. All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post (see example below) and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.

If you're up for a challenge, learn how to tag your posts with Technorati tags so they can become part of Technorati tag searches. Create a post about something. It can be anything you want and add the HTML code to the bottom to tag it as “LibraryLearning2.0.” You may also want to consider claiming your blog and creating a watchlist. NOTE: When adding HTML code, you'll want to make sure you're in Blogger's Edit HTML window. There's a lot to explore.