Sunday, July 27, 2008

# 9 (Week 4): Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts

So now that you’ve been blogging for a while, you might be wondering just how big the blogosphere is. Well, according to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, the number of blogs doubles just about every 6 months.
On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog. 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.

So how does a person get their blog listed as part of the blogosphere?
The answer 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.

There are many ways of searching for blogs in Technorati. You can search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).

Discovery Exercise (#9):
1. Explore Technorati - click on the links in the Navigation Bar.

2. Use Technorati Advanced Search and search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

3. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

4. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.

5. Use your gmail account to email
northshorelibraries@gmail.com with a link to your blogpost. Please put Exercise #9 in the subject heading.

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