Thing #7: Blog Searching

Techno-whatty?

Technorati, the leading search tool for blogs, is my next destination. It literally crawls the web, like a spider, for blog postings. Eww at that image! I chose to search the tools in Technorati using the term "Instagram", one of my favorite cell phone Apps for social media. (I admit to checking people I follow every day!) Searching for blog postings resulted in 833 results! Wow. Quite a difference from actual blogs dealing with Instagram, which resulted in a measly 52 blogs. Interstingly enough, tags used by bloggers in their posts about Instagram only resulted in only 20, since the latest results are all that are posted.

Although Technorati is interesting, I didn't like the restriction of tags. I originally was going to search for libraries, but it wasn't listed in Technorati's tag directory. I'm surprised there wasn't a wider variety of tags to search from, although most deal with technology or current events.

Tagging is both a great and rather evil thing. Great because it helps bloggers organize their thoughts and helps those reading their blogs to find subjects they are interested in. Evil because there are so many ways to tag things that might be slightly different to each person. For instance, I could be trying to find motor vehicles instead of cars tag searches on Flickr or Technorati, which would skew my results. That's why I think we need a definite catalog system for tags like the Dewey Decimal System for books. But then that's like censoring people's thoughts and opinions in their personal expression, which is dangerously like censorship. It's so complicated!

One of my classmates commented on not liking the whole format of Technorati, which I have to agree with. She likened it to reading a stock exchange. Again, no argument here...