Week 6 #14

Ugh! I really have to work myself up to being excited to look for other people's blogs. Technorati is interesting but right now I don't see myself using it all that often. I did play around a little and searching seems pretty standard. There was a difference between searching posts and the directory. Posts is like a search full text and directory is like a search title. The first search gives you a lists of individual posts in different blogs that contain your search terms, the second search gives you whole blogs that have been identified as being about your search terms. Tag search was definitely interesting! Some of the same posts and blogs came up, and also some new stuff both relevant and not. The not relevant stuff, Japanese bikini stuff, seemed to have no tags that were remotely related to what I had searched yet they came up in the list anyway. I still haven't figured that one out.

Using the popular page. Lists created by statistical compiling of the masses preferences. There is so much that is wrong with this. The people contributing are only those with blogs, everyone else is left out. Actually it is a subset of people with blogs - only those mentioning a book, movie, DVD, game, ect. in their blog in a way that the spider recognizes are counted. Another subset - those whose blogs are part of Technorati. Could this be another manifestation of the digital divide? Those with access and the knowledge to use it their opinions count and are counted? How does/will this translate to things with a bit more substance like elections, policy, laws, ect.? People are swayed when they hear things on TV using statistics from these sorts of things! What happens when those being swayed by these statistics had no part in forming them? I don't have any answers just questions!

Tagging. The possibilities seem endless and the difficulties enormous! I think it is great from a personal organizational perspective. I can organize my web stuff by how I will best find it again, especially if I use the same tags from site to site. However, everyone can use even just slight different variations (citation, citations) or completely different tags (MLA, APA) and searching becomes more complex. A working knowledge of boolean operators is still relevant here, especially with the explanation given by at the advanced search page of Technorati for "OR" - Separate tags with "OR" to search multiple subjects. Huh? This explanation while correct, sort of, is not the way that I use this operator, and what a messy list of hits it returns.