Technorati

So now that you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering just how big the blogosphere is. Well, according to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, as of April 2007, there were 70 million weblogs, with 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day.

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 does a person get their 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. You can control whether WordPress notifies Technorati of you new posts by logging into your WordPress account, clicking on Options and then clicking on Privacy. Since we will be using Technorati to track blog posts for this class, make sure the top option is selected.

As for tagging posts? This is easy, too. Just add them in the tag box when you are composing your message, separating each tag with a comma. Be sure to add the semls20 tag so that it will appear with your other classmate's posts at http://www.technorati.com/tag/semls20.

Exercise

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Library 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. Be sure to tag your blog posts with semls20 and to visit the semls20 tag page to see what your classmates are blogging about.