So now that you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering just how big is the blogosphere? Well according to San Francisco based Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, there are “over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.” Technorati currently tracks 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged data.Yes, these numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries.
So how do you get your blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you’re already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But if you want to join the party and have your blog officially listed on Technorati and also take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you’ll need to claim your blog yourself. As for tagging posts with Technorati tags? This is easy too. All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post (see example below) and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.
There are a lot of features in Technorati including the capability to search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, limit a search by language, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).
Background information:
1. View the blog from Technorati. View the tags used to categorize the information included in the posts.
2. Watch this video of the leadership at Technorati talking about their "product."
3. Read this blog post that discusses tags and tagging in things like Technorati, Delicious, amazon.com, and the effect it is having on advertisers.
Discovery Exercise:
1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “School Library 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 for Thing #14 and express your thoughts regarding how Technorati and its features could assist you. Since you have now looked at several tools that use tagging (Technorati, Delicious, and Flickr), add your thoughts about the value of tagging information.about your discoveries on this site.
Optional Discovery Resources:
- Register and claim your blog. It will increase the traffic that visits your blog.
- Browse topics of interest - http://www.technorati.com/blogs/directory/
Curriculum Connections:
Idea #1: Use these tools to locate blogs and other sites relating to election or other issues.
1 comment:
Thing #14: Explore Technorati and learn how tags work with blog posts
The importance of tagging is that these phrasesand/or keywords, are what people will use to search the internet, and thus belinked to your blog. If there is enough traffic in your blog, then you might be selected to be part of "pay per click" advertising. Tags are what will make your blog successful.
Technorati is a search engine just for blogs. Using technorati will help you wade through the many blogs, and find some you might actually want to follow.
Post a Comment