Thing #14...Technorati and How Tags Work

I had a hard time doing the first discovery activity as it seems that Technorati has revamped its web site since the video by Liz Dunn was made in 2006. I entered "School Library Learning 2.0" next to the search navigation but was not able to target a search option (i.e., either in blog posts, in tags, or in blog directory); after 5 minutes (duh!), I finally realized that maybe I'd better check the "advanced" feature! Ban-zai! There it was... and the results are very different, indeed. My search resulted in 1,481 results for blog posts, 19 blogs, and 36 posts tagged School AND Library AND Learning AND 2.0. So, YES, the results were very different! Just to give my two-cents, the drop-down menu featured on the 2006 Technorati version seemed way more user-friendly to me! I feel like I had to jump through hoops today!

I wasn't too impressed with the top 100 popular blogs that were listed under the tab "overview" under the Blogger Central feature. It was fun looking at the blog reactions of the 100 most popular videos though, particularly the ones about Bert & Ernie 'Tries' Gangsta-Rap! I did a post search for "Mongolia" and was overwhelmed with results that had nothing to do with what I had in mind --I was seeking more of a "travelogue!" That's how the tags helped me narrow down my search and bingo, I found what I was looking for: Getting on Mongol Time! I also liked using the Technorati blog directory feature as my way to browse through possible reading topics that might strike my fancy... such as about pets, of course!

So far, I have to say that from all of the tagging tools that I have dabbled with so far, de.li.cio.us is my favorite one and seems to work best for me. I share the same vision as Joshua Schachter, the programmer who invented Del.icio.us: "Tagging is something you do for yourself, to help find information" which differs with Technorati's view of tagging. Del.icio.us and its efficient "folksonomy" has indeed made finding information a piece of cake of cake for me! Now, I have even started leaving tags on my Google Notebook so that I will be able to locate my notes about a topic much more easily. Beware of the contagious nature of tagging, folks --you might be "recipe tagging" before long... or does that already exist? :)

Over-achiever that I am, I went through the steps to claim my blog and that was really easy. However, now that I am performing a search under "ESLfroggie" or "Wannabe Polyglot," nothing is coming up. I have the feeling that I am not doing something right AGAIN--gee, Technorati is THE blog search engine by excellence, after all. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with the widgets, though. However, let's face it, coining a new term is in order when it comes to my Technorati savvy: techno~illiterati!

Thing #13...Tagging and Discovering Del.icio.us

~an online file cabinet of saved web pages~ (furl.net)

Eureka! Social bookmarking has been the best invention ever! It is about time that I found a tool that allows me to work smart and not hard. My URL folders always seem filled to the brim with great educational websites but they end up in such an unorganized mess that I can't retrieve anything without a whole lot of frustration and wasting a whole lot of time!

Second common scenario with me: big epiphany --it dawns on me that there is this cool website that I viewed at home that would really work well with the lesson that I am currently teaching at school... I end up spending my whole planning time desperately looking for the website in question because it is bookmarked on my home computer and I am not --argh!

Registering with del.icio.us was a piece of cake and so was importing all of my 774 urls from my home iMac too. It was nice to see my bookmark chaos get organized at the click of a button!del.icio.us will definitely help me manage my "reading list" in a much more effective way. At last, I will be able to access my bookmarks from anywhere and no matter which computer I use. Another feature I liked and that was also available with Furl is that it is possible to highlight text on the website that will be saved along the tags you create --no need to scan the whole website for the part you thought would be good to quote in your research paper! How brilliant! One thing I haven't figured out yet with del.ici.ous is out to have my tags displayed as cloud tags --being visual, I really like how the size of the tags in the list reflects their popularity. Another feature that I liked that Ma.gnolia offered and del.icio.us doesn't have is that the tags are separated with commas. With del.icio.us, I am having a hard time staying consistent with my folksonomy --sometimes I tag a website Character.Education, another time CharacterEducation, and yet at other times Character_Education... I need to find a way to remain consistent. At any rate, I love the ability to search websites by giving keywords like ESL or French and see the plethora that pops up, knowing that I will be able to locate the gems I found again in the future without a lot of sweat and exasperation!

An application that I thought that I could theoretically use del.icio.us with my students is for a research project. I could create a unique tag & then have students post their findings of the topic under the shared tag. This way I could monitor their research and my students could piggy-back on each others' discoveries. Yet at this time, I still have to figure out how I would set all this up to work for a whole classroom...