Thing #14: Technorati & How Tags Work

I really enjoyed the video of the Technorati execs talk about their site. One notable quote from the video was that the site is about "connecting people directly with people." I also liked their philosophy of providing a mechanism through which people can get news from real people--news that is not filtered through the gatekeepers of traditional mass media.

I have used Technorati to find blog posts about conferences that I was not able to attend. For example, do a search on NECC08 to find blog posts in Technorati's directory that are tagged as containing information about this year's NECC conference. With the site redesign, I can see that it will be much easier to do more than just search, especially when finding news stories and other current events to include in class discussions. Prominently displayed on their home page are categories for both rising blog posts and news stories by attention. How helpful to see these at a glance. From their "what's popular" page, I found one interesting blog post from TechCrunch about a new search engines called Cuil. Unfortunately, some of the other things that are popular right now are definitely not appropriate for K12 students.

Used appropriately, I think that tags can be a useful tool. I kind of like the idea behind "folksonomy" in that end users decide the labels and categories for information. I can also see the usefulness of a blogger, or other content creator, to tag his own work. This could help the blogger organize his own collection, as well as direct others more easily to topics of their interest. On Technorati, I was surprised to find that a tag search for my keywords yielded much more appropriate results than a general blog search. It will be useful to take advantage of all the search types to find the most amount of information.

Thing #13 Tagging, Del.icio.us, and Social Bookmarking

In this activity, I explored several social bookmarking sites, including del.icio.us, ma.gnolia and Furl. Although del.icio.us is probably the most widely used, the other two have nice features. I especially like the graphical layout on ma.gnolia's site. I've also gained a whole new appreciation for tags and I've discovered many neat resources that I probably would not otherwise have found because of getting "lost" in a tag cloud.

I can see several useful applications for social bookmarking in the classroom. In its most simple form, a social bookmarking system could be used for teachers of a specific discipline or course to collect useful links and share them with one another. For student applications, the students could each contribute links for different topics to collaborate to create a student-reviewed reading and/or reference list.

As a result of my learning from this activity, I'd also like to explore the social bookmarking module for Moodle. If you are already using Moodle for your course management system, it may be easier to use this than to have your students use yet another service with another separate login.