Thing #14

I liked both of the Technorati videos, which was a relief, because the words "portmanteau" and "literati" that appeared before the video links on Library2Play had made me a little nervous. Sidenote: Doesn't the guy on the YouTube video (Brian) look like Ferris' friend in the movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off"?

Technorati is very user-friendly. The screen isn't too cluttered and it is easy to navigate. The "authority" feature is helpful, because it allows you to find out what the average person thinks about something vs. a paid professional.

When I did the keyword search for "School Library Learning 2.0" using a regular directory search, there were 237 results. Searching just blogs brought 69 results. Searching just tags brought 28 results.

I thought it was interesting that the top ten blogs were all technology-related, but the top 10 searches were for Jennifer Garner, Paris Hilton, Vanessa Minnillo, etc.

It's clear that tagging is very valuable. Tags help you organize, research, and establish collaborate social networks. Cool Cat had listed adding tags as one of the things you need to do to comment like a king or queen (Thing #12). I suppose that means I should be tagging all of my posts, too. Maybe I'll go back and do that . . .

Wouldn't it be neat to be able to tag school paperwork the same way? Do you need to grade the stories the kids in room 200 just wrote about birds? Just use the stories, room200, and birds tags. Wow! They all flew out of the kids' writing notebooks and onto your desk. Even the ones from the notebooks that were lost and buried deep inside messy student desks! Do you just need the bird stories from the four ESOL kids in your class to use with the TELPAS rating forms? Just use the stories, room200, birds, ESOL, and TELPAS tags, and . . . voila! . . . there the forms and stories are, all in a neat stack on your desk in front of you. You need a sample bird story from the teacher across the hall to show to your class? Just do a tag search, and . . . whoa! . . . there it is! There's also one you can use from a teacher in Nova Scotia! Awesome! And to think . . . you didn't even need to get up out of your chair!