Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Technorati

(Week 6, Thing 14)

Now that I have created a blog I need to make it possible for people to find it. Fortunately, Technorati provides an easy blog indexing service. Like del.icio.us, Technocrati allows users to both maintain a list of favorite websites and to tag them with specific words. However, while del.icio.us is designed for general websites, Technorati is designed specifically for blogs.

If you already have a Technorati account you can add me by clicking on the link in the sidebar of this page, right below my profile picture and my del.icio.us link. This ability to connect to other bloggers adds an important social networking aspect to the site. Technorati also provides the ability to capture headlines from your favorite blogs and a general ranking for all blogs indexed. How high was my blog ranked? Um, well, the last time I checked my ranking was somewhere below 3 million...

Anyway! Despite my low ranking - which indicates that no one is really reading this - Technorati is still useful for many reasons. For example, as all of the librarians in the state of Maryland will eventually be doing blogs like this, I will want to find their sites, compare their work with mine, and link to them. By searching for the tag used throughout this program - mdlearning2 - I can very easily find other users. Additionally, by simply typing that phrase into this blog posting other librarians can use it to find me on the site. Considering how unofficial and scattered blogs can be, an easy search engine such as this provides a much needed service in the search for opinion information. As more public information postings - such as the Calvert Library's community event calendar - begin to evolve into easily edited blogs, indexing such as this will become more relevant to library systems throughout the country.

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