Tag-a-logging: Exercise #14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

And the Exercise says: Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

Okay, folks. A pet peeve that is growing larger as I go through this course. The language in this training doesn't match the language in the source we're directed to. It's no one's fault. Change is the order of the day. It's unsettling as it is inevitable. It does, however, make it difficult for a newbie to follow along and complete this training. I wonder if we'll lose a lot of people along the way just because they couldn't figure out what the training was asking them to do in the exercises.

I clicked on the Advanced Search on Technorati when working on these exercises. I did a Tag search for Learning 2.0. A tag search got me 1,026 hits. A URL search got me 860 hits. If you put it in quotes- "Learning 2.0", you get 241 hits. TO put in quotes or not to put in quotes? Dispensing with the punctuation always gets more hits:
Keyword Seach: with " : 8743 Without " : 8745
Phrase Search: with " : 0!!! Without " : 464
I'll bet most people don't use the quotes when searching for something on this site. I tried it with Interlibrary Loan. 266 with, 499 without.

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

It's interesting to see what others are find noteable and valuable on the Web. I found some sites that I added to my del.icio.us listings. I really wasn't surprised to see that Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams was in the top spot for YouTubes faves.

I've been tagging since the beginning of my blogging without knowing why. It must be that old cataloging class making its mark on me. I claimed this blog and another in Technocrati. I'm holding off on doing the watchlist for now. It would truly amaze me if anyone thought that any of my blog posts were noteworthy.

Tag! You're It! Lucky Lesson #13 on del.icio.us

I've loved and lost many a list of websites because I moved computers or because some IT person re-imaged my PC without giving me a chance to snag my Favorites. In some cases, this was a good thing. My new lists were now made up of the sites I could readily remember and those I used frequently. Starting out fresh also got rid of defunct sites. At work my focus narrowed from collecting sites that helped me answer frequently asked questions & Reader's Advisory sites to collecting specific ILL-related sites that helped me and my staff do our work.

I kinda like del.icio.us. I was first introduced to del.icio.us at an ILL conference. The speaker included it in a super-sonic speedy overview of Web 2.0 tools that she couldn't live without. As my eyes recovered from glazing over, I really didn't couldn't see how I was going to use this knowledge and I relegated the information to my internal "Things I'll Get Around to Looking at When I Have the Time" file. The big drawback I have with del.icio.us is that it's a bit clunky to use- when compared to the coupla clicks efficiency of putting a site in Favorites or in Links. I'm not that crazy about the tagging. Possibly, that's because I don't have a handle on that part yet. I'd rather categorize the sites in general categories of use. The overlapping nature of some of the tags puts some sites in the "wrong" bundle. It's a lot like cataloging sites -as opposed to categorizing them the way you can in Favorites by organizing them by a file name.

Back to the Exercise:
Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?
I looked at a blog called: LibraryTechtonics: Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us. It was saved by 77 other people. The comments are brief- most of them talk about the blog though I've noticed a comment that was more about the tagger than about the blog post. Many of used used the same tags for this article.
What del.icio.us doesn't do is this: it doesn't cull out the dead sites. I skimmed and sampled what I was most interested in on the PLCMC del.icio.us site. During a brief viewing, I found 2 dead sites.

Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool. This is it.
Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Definitely. If -say- the JPL Fiction Department had a del.icio.us site with helpful Reader's Advisory. Or Popular could have a del.icio.us site with music, film, TV, etc. sites. It could be set up so that staff throughout the system could contribute sites that helped them answer customers' questions. You could tap the expertise of all the staff to help answer customers' questions. Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? It is that too. I discussed that more earlier in this post.

I have a del.icio.us badge on this blogspot.