Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

Took a good look around Technorati and did a keyword search for "Learning 2.0" in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. There were differences in the results. From the Technorati Search Page I found putting a capital "L" and a lowercase"l" for the word "learning" and having a gap between the word "learning" and "2.0" and having no gap between the word "learning" and "2.0" gave you different results. I found these results:

Learning2.0 - 251 posts
Learning 2.0 - 684 posts
learning2.0 - 254 posts
learning 2.0 - 684 posts

So as you can see there is a big difference in how you do tag your blog posts.

Using Technorati's Advanced Search I did a Tag Search and found again that there were differences in the results and here they are:

learning 2.0 - 686 posts tagged
learning2.0 - 266 posts tagged
Learning 2.0 - 684 posts tagged
Learning2.0 - 263 posts tagged

I then looked at the Blog Directory and the directory is only used to find blogs about subjects you are interested in or to find blogs by their blog title, it doesn't give you the number of blog posts which have the same tags - so no results here.

Exploring popular blog, searches and tags I found the most popular blog was Boing Boing with 3,820 fans and the Top 100 blogs by authority was Breaking News and Opinion on the Huffington Post, which had 26,454 blog reactions (comments). Under Top Searches I looked at the topic Olympics and came across this blog post Beijing 2008: Sky Team's Microblog [IMG] - in the blog it mentioned that 22 Sky News people will be covering the Olympics by contributing to a Microblog using mobile phones, this is very ingenious for getting news out of China and bypassing China's censorship rules don't you think.

Tagging, folksonomies & social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Took a look around Del.icio.us using the PLCMCL2 account and clicked on a bookmark that had been bookmarked by alot of other users, 3745 to be exact, the site is Us.ef.ul: A begginners guide to Del.icio.us, the most common tags for this site were del.icio.us, howto, tips, web2.0 and tutorial. I clicked onto other users that had bookmarked this site and had a look at what other sites they had bookmarked. I came across a very useful reference website called 100 Unbelievably Useful Reference Sites You've Never Heard Of. This reference site is great for students, teachers, librarians and even the general public. The section on Teacher's Reference is great because this provides a teacher's guide for double-checking facts, looking for quotes and providing ideas for lesson plans. This section also featured the Children's Literature Web Guide, where award-winning children's books could be located. Under the section Librarian References I found great reference sites for librarians like Historical Text Archives, and the educational search engine called KidsClick! developed by librarians and organized into topics like society & government, health & family, machines & transportation, there was also the Library of Congress Online and Library Spot, which provides links to encyclopedias, business references and public libraries. Under the Search Engines section I found Rollyo ( how interesting), this section provided other search engines other than Google e.g. Giga Blast ( which enables you to search websites, videos and images). I think Manukau Libraries would benefit from having a link to this website for homework and general knowledge questions.

Quotes about Libraries was another site I found when clicking onto another user's bookmark. Here are some interesting library quotes:

Booklovers never go to bed alone.
-Unknown

Knowledge is free at the library. Just bring a container.
-Unknown

Seventy million books in American's libraries but the one you want to read is always out.
-Tom Mason

I find that a great part of the information I have was acquired by looking something up and finding something else on the way.
-Franklin P Adams

Borrowers of books--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of symmetry of shelves and creators of odd volumes.
-Charles Lamb

I think we library staff can relate to the last quote really well. Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking site beause you are able to see how other users have tagged similar sites and from their tags you are able to discover other websites that could be of interest to you, or could provide new insights/ information for the research you're doing. Because your bookmarks are stored online you are able to access the same bookmarks from any computer and easily add bookmarks as well this is the great advantage of using del.icio.us.