Thing #14 Technorati and How Tags Work

I have to admit that I found Technorati a bit confusing and their pages somewhat cluttered. When things are too busy and not organized in an easy-to-read fashion, I find myself moving on to something else that is more user friendly.

I did enjoy the video, and I thought it was interesting to meet the people behind Technorati and hear from them why they are doing what they are doing. They seemed genuinely interested in what they are trying to accomplish, and they also seemed interested in continuing to make it user friendly for the "regular" person. I liked their statement about not just letting CNN and the Evening News Programs, etc. determine what they think is good news, but letting regular people decide what they want to talk about and know more about---and then giving them a way to have some type of conversation about it.

I am not sure that I did my searches correctly because I came up with information that wasn't always relevant to the terms. I got 1,562 Blog Posts when I used the search terms, and I found that the articles were using any combination of those 4 words somewhere in their posting. Some were relevant and some didn't appear to have much to do with the subject---too much information to plow through. When I searched the Blog Directory, there was a much lower number - 16 - but many of them had 0 fans, so I assume that means that no one is reading them. I tried the search a second time and got an error message.

I found it was interesting that they had the Top 100 blogs and that the most popular in the world, as determined by Technorati, had 3,717 fans. That is a lot of people reading that blog. The top videos would change each time I checked them, so they seem to keep their information very current.

I'm not sure this will help me very much at the present time, because I felt overwhelmed by the information and search features. Perhaps with a little more experience I would appreciate it more. I don't see many applications for elementary school lessons. Maybe I am missing the big picture and will find more benefit to it later. I think tagging in general is a good idea and a step in the right direction as far as organizing information. I think that the amount of information is growing at such a fast pace that it is difficult to keep track of what is actually relevant and worthwhile.