Challenge 14

Challenge:
1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.

4. Now that we’ve worked with tags in Flickr, Del.icio.us, and Technorati, what are your thoughts about tagging? What are its advantages? What are its disadvantages?


I took a look at the keyword searching. The results were very different. The blog post search was too general, pulling up 30,610 blogs with "Learning" and "2.0" within the posts....Office 2.0, Community 2.0, E Learning, Web 2.0, etc. The tag search was more specific with only 274 blogs, as well as videos and photos. The blog directory was the most specific pulling up library specific learning 2.0 blogs, including the SJSU/SJPL blog.

When searching the popular blogs, it was interesting to see "Boing Boing" as a familiar name.....from the RSS Feed/Bloglines exercise. I found a Boing Boing post about Headless Cockroaches being able to survive for weeks. They have an open circulatory system, unlike people, so there's not a significant drop in blood pressure when decapitated. They also breathe through pores in various parts of their body, so repiration is not badly affected either. It sounds like they would likely expire due to infection or lack of nutrition.

Thoughts about tagging.....I think it's a great advantage to be able to pull up information that other people have tagged on topics that pique my interest. The disadvantage is sometimes thinking of tags to add onto information that I'm "putting out there". Are people really that interested?