Playing Ping Pong with the Technorati

Remember when we were kids and we had a Secret Diary? We carefully recorded our thoughts and dreams, and then hid the diary where our parents, sibling and friends couldn't find it. We might even have had a lock and key!

Now with the world of blogs -- these digital diaries of sorts -- you are sharing your thoughts with the World Wide Web. If you are a blogger, you obviously want others to read your thoughts and ideas. Maybe even market your blog. So one of the first things you can do to get your blog noticed by others is to tag it or have it with blog search tools such as Technorati. You can also make sure people find your most updated posts by pinging them to search engines.

For our library's web 2.0 exploration project, we took a look at Technorati and learned how to tag our blog posts with the site's tags. For this excersie, we searched the tag field to see what blogs we could find about the concept of web 2.0. I found this type of search to be a bit cumbersome. First, I got 35, 289 hits. Second, I noticed in the "related tags" list that there are other tags that were variant spellings of "web 2.o" ("web 2-0" and "web2.o"). Third, not all the "hits" dealt with web 2.0. The first blog I looked at was just an advertisement and not someone's ideas or thoughts about web 2.0.

Overall, as a librarian, I didn't find the use of tags in techorati or del.icio.us or other sites to be useful in finding relevant information. I can't imagine how to find information without using formal knowledge classification systems (Dewey Decimal System, Library of Congress). Even with minor flaws, these systems are more useful to me in that they are based up a standard -- an agreed upon designation -- for any given subject or body of knowledge. It would be like driving without a road map. You might get to your destination, but you might wind up going in circles before you arrive.

However, as an informal method of sharing information, tags and such can be a fun way to drive around the blogosphere, seeing sites and things along the way that you might not have discovered if you had that road map.

Namaste.