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!

Thing #9

I found the easiest search tool was Google Blog Search. I think the main reason I liked it best is because I have gotten used to the way Google sets things up; but I also liked it because it seemed to lead me to more relevant connections than any of the other ones. Bloglines came in second -- I liked how it let you rank results by popularity -- but the dancing dots on the home page were very distracting.

The School Library Blogs on Suprglu confused me. Unless I missed it, there was no table of contents or search rectangle to help with any kind of search. Topix was downright frightening.

The Edublog's Award winners link is great! It would take days to go through all of the nominees' blogs, but I already got some good ideas by clicking on just a few of them. I have subscribed to Latest Activity on Projects by Jen and Techlearning (recommended by the Cool Cat Teacher blog).

The most unusual feed I came across was Dave Walker's blog called Dullestblog.com. He claims it is the dullest blog in the world, and he may be right. When I visited the blog, the most recent post was about putting pencils in a drawer. Believe it or not, there were 292 responses to that post. My favorite response was, "And I thought my blog was boring. Yours actually had me in a coma since Friday."