Week 6, Thing 14

I've done this activity at least 6 times and keep coming up with the same conclusions - people have too much time on their hands. I've been away from this tutorial for so long because life happens (besides trying to save the positions of the secondary teacher librarians in our district). As often as I've played around on Technorati, I'm still confused as to its purpose. I suppose looking at popular blogs is an interesting activity, but what concerns me most about blogs is the content - it is someone's opinion - loosely based on facts, if at all. I teach my students that they can find supporting documentation on any viewpoint and this is especially true of bloggers. I did a search on "California budget" and came up with comments about articles that were in this morning's paper. I suppose that reading editorials the same day as news gives me an edge, but why? I like sitting with my coffee and newspaper in the morning. I also searched using other terms and came up with interesting results depending on the way the blogs or posts were tagged.

I do think that there are advantages to tagging. Since using del.icio.us I utilize tags more often than before. It helps to organize entries and makes it easier to sort through multiple items. I really can't see any disadvantages to tagging, although I do have a tendency to skimp on my tags and that might limit my searches.

I don't foresee using Tecnorati at school and I certainly can't see my teachers using this search engine. I have already seen blogs show up in Google searches, so we now have to teach our students to be even more diligent when it comes to evaluating web sites.