Technorati

So this was exciting. Often on Blogger I've been frustrated with the lack of ability to search for blogs on topics that I was interested in. I knew there must be a way to do it! So Technorati is really cool.

Of the categories on the blog directory, my impression was that they hit the popular culture pretty well. Judging by the magazines in the check-out counter, people are pretty obsessed with celebrities' lives, and entertainment, so obviously that would be a big deal. My own blog (my real one) is a book blog, attached to my website, so I could see how there would be 3592 blogs about books. That's good news for librarians, I hope. I wonder how many of those books are being read in print form, and how many in electronic?

Also, business is a big deal to a lot of people, especially with the focus on the "economic downturn." I wasn't surprised to see sports, politics, and technology on there, obviously. After the success of Julie and Julia I would have been shocked if the "living" section had been less popular. I personally know a number of people who have cooking blogs.

How sad that education didn't have a category in the blog directory. I wonder why that is, because I did a search for blogs related to teaching and got 4202. Wow...that could take a while to wade through. Is there a reason why they didn't put education in the directory? When I did a search for posts with the same key word, I got only 529. That's still a lot, but I found it interesting that the number would be less. I'm not sure why that is. I confirmed the trend when I also did a search for "yellow labrador retriever" and got 11 blogs, some of which looked pretty interesting. When I searched for posts under the same key word I got no hits at all. Still can't figure out why that would be. Next I looked under the key words "school library" and found 216 blogs (pretty good!) and 85 posts.

Overall, I think Technorati is really cool for my own personal use. I'm thinking it would be a good way to follow blogs related to libraries and librarianship. As far as educational applications go for school hours with students, again, I'm thinking about how much there is to do in the small time we have with our students. How would we monitor which blogs were appropriate and which weren't? It seems out of the purview of the public school, and a real headache with parents. I could use it to find blogs to recommend.