This has been some journey, travelling through the latest in web 2.0 through a search on technorati which led me to mashable which then led me to an amazing bunch of articles about microblogging on twitter where I got well and truly lost in microblogland for quite a while. Delicious was a wonder. I can really see that this form of communication would be great for people in distance education - fantastic and fast connectivity of people, ideas and resources.
The difference that I found between Google blog search and Technorati is volume (Google gives huge results) and accuracy (Technorati gives fewer high quality results). Depending on what you're looking for I'd say Technorati is a far better choice. For example, I searched an obscure artist's name and got 285 results in Google and 22 in Technorati which were the more relevant blogs, mostly included amongst the Google results but harder to find. I like the way Technorati displays the results with a thumbnail of the blog page to the left of each result and the title of the post as the heading and url below. It's a lot clearer than Google blog search results pages.
Up until today I have not used tags in my blog but I can see now how tagging is so crucial to good searching and why other bloggers here have complained about the slack tagging on flickr - there's definately no 'standard' except how much we want our 'stuff' to be found by the world out there. Delicious and Technorati drive home the importance of the tag system which is pretty elegant and logical if we apply the desire to be found. It's also easy to hone in on rare and more refined results with a more specific use of language, that is, as long as we're all thinking in the same language.
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