Thing 14

Technorati was an interesting little site to play around on.  Although some of the features like widgets and popular tags/blogs were under construction, I can see how it might be beneficial in the future.  I liked its top100 link, though.  I especially liked the blog Mashable, which I'm now following.

In Technorati, there were no posts found when searching for "School Library Learning 2.0."  The blog directory also had no findings.  There were also no tags under that heading.  Doing a search under "Library2Play," however, pulled up four separate blogs in the blog directory: Library Byte By Byte, Amy's Blog, Unraveling-threadsoflife, and Shelf Life.  Nothing in tags or posts, though.  The popular blogs, searches, and tags is currently under construction, so I could not explore it to use, but I bet it would be interesting.

I'm beginning to like tagging more and more, although I agree with Joshua Schachter, who expressed in the article "Tag, you're it to advertisers," by Eric Benderoff, that he believes users should be the ones doing the tagging, not the publishers or writers of blogs, advertisers, etc.  When users are creating the tags, it's to share or organize information and make it easier to access.  When publishers tag, they're trying to drum up business, so the tag doesn't always lead you to what you want.  I have this issue a lot when I'm trying to find explanations or how-to's and accidentally click on "related" ads that try to sell me products instead of bring me to reviews or blogs written by people who have attempted to make whatever I'm making.  Oh!  And it seriously frustrates me to high heavens when I'm trying to research things for my dietary needs (severely lactose intolerant - I treat it like a milk allergy).  It never fails that I'll be trying to find recipes or substitutes or just the ingredients for something and end up on some random site for probiotics or lactose-helping pills.  I don't WANT to purchase any fix-it products.  I don't CARE that I can't eat dairy.  I just want to know what I can use in it's place or what something has in it!  Does anyone else have this problem, or am I alone in my rant?

With sites like Delicious, I'm able to bookmark and organize blogs and informational sites that have what I need and not go through to pain and agony of advertisements.  I'm really loving the ease of it.  I'm also loving the fact that I can highlight and add sticky notes to pages through diigo, instead of copying and pasting them into Microsoft Word (including the information for citing the site if I ever use it).  I wonder if there are any academic/studying bookmarking sites out there . . . ones that are specifically for researching and taking notes that possibly even cater to students . . . seems like it might be a good idea.