#14: Technorati

Today I spent more time looking through Technorati than I ever have before. I did learn some things but found it pretty frustrating, which has been my experience every time I've tried to look through Technorati previously. It doesn't do a good job of telling you what you are looking at so if you are a new user it can be pretty intimidating to try to find your way around and understand what their postings actually are.

For example, one of the assignments was to do a keyword search for Learning 2.0 in the Blog Directory. I went to the Blog Directory page and did a search for that term. I got a different number of results than when I did a search on the main Blogger Central page but it was only a slightly different number. Neither results pages indicated where my results came from - what grouping I was actually searching. I thought this was confusing and sort of irritating.

I was hoping to be able to see a tag cloud of the most popular tags but all I could find was the 10 most popular tags on the main Blogger Central page - way less than I would find useful.

But speaking of useful, now that I've looked through Technorati much more thoroughly than I have ever done before (and I did this mainly because I HAD to for this assignment, because the whole process was pretty irritating), I still don't think this is something I would be likely to use much. I guess I just don't care what some random person thinks about Obama, or Brittney Spears, or Apple.

I will definitly NOT claim my blog, nor tag my posts so more people can find them. Are you kidding? Nobody gives a hoot what I have to say about Learning 2.0. I guess I'm not much of a social networker! :-)

Del.icio.us

I like the idea of sharing favorite Web sites with others through a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us, but I doubt I would do this myself. I mean, it's cool and all, but other than photographs, there's not much about myself I really want to share with the world.

I can see how it might be useful if you were doing research, but is it really better than Google? Would I get better search results going to Del.icio.us and searching tags? I don't know the answer to that. I guess if I was working on something very in-depth it would be a good way to be as thorough as I possibly could be.

Generally I'm not really interested in viewing other people's comments about Web sites but I suppose the ability to see who else has bookmarked a certain site and commented on it might be kind of interesting.

All in all, this is something I probably wouldn't use but am glad to know about.

Adding a JAXCAT Search Gadget

It's added now to my blog. I'm not too fond of the way it looks, though - probably will take it off eventually. The instructions were pretty easy to follow although not totally accurate - I wasn't quite sure how to access the dashboard of this account from the blog itself, although I reasoned that "customize" might get me there and it did - yay!

Once there it was pretty simple to add - thanks for supplying the script!

Not that I will actually USE it. Since it offers limited functionality I doubt I would routinely search JAXCAT from my blog page, and I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone else, either. I wish it opened in a new window - anyone using it on my page would be directed somewhere else rather than staying on my page, which I really wouldn't want.

It's still pretty cool, though, and I would have no idea how to create it, so kudos to whoever did!

LibraryThing is my thing

I've been using LibraryThing for quite a while, mostly just to keep track of books that I have read. It's cool that you can add books to your library, review (or just summarize) them, rate them, and sort them in a variety of ways. I usually sort by date - most recent to oldest.

I use it to just REMEMBER books I've read, though - not to discuss books, or trade books, or look at the LibraryThing blog, or any of the other things you can do with LibraryThing. I LOVE to read but generally don't really enjoy discussing books(hence I will probably never run a book club!), so all those other functions really aren't for me. It's a record-keeping system. Guess I will have to upgrade to the paid account when I reach 200 titles - only about 75 more to go!

Here's the link to my LibraryThing catalog:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/camtb

Playing around with image generators

Well, this lesson just seems like more of the same. Didn't we already do this last week? Sigh...

Anyway, I didn't really find any image generators that really thrilled me but I did do a Wordle, which was kind of fun:

Using search tools to locate RSS feeds

Well, this was mostly a bust for me. Bloglines search tools were pretty easy and intuitive to use but I really didn't think much of all the other ones. Feedster was not up when I tried to access it. Technorati seems like much ado about nothing to me. You still have to follow the link to each news item to get the feed (unless I missed something) and they don't even cite the source unless you go into the detailed screen. I kind of liked Topix.net 'cause the news items were local but, as above, I still had to follow each link for each news item in order to get the feeds.

I think what I would do would be to go to Web sites that I use frequently to get news and get the feeds directly from there. These aggregators are not my cup of tea.

Bloglines & RSS

I found the RSS feeds assignment very enlightening. In the past I have not really understood how to set up RSS feeds, but with Bloglines it's pretty simple. The thing I had the most trouble with was coming up with 10 RSS feed to add to my Bloglines account. I think this is something I will be tweaking over the coming weeks.

Here's the public URL to my Bloglines account:
http://www.bloglines.com/public/CBailey