Task 14: Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

Well first of all I thought I'd search without forcing a phrase - a search on plain learning 2.0 was useless -6,510 posts, 942 blogs, 1 683 tags.

Searching for "learning 2.0" gave me 1 615 posts, 351 blogs and 651 tags.

2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

I looked around at a few popular sites - lots of mildly interesting commentary about the American election but frankly it doesn't really do it for me. A lot of people are chatting about things that I'm not interested in. Still seems to me (self included now) that there are a lot of people writing comments that no one is going to read.

I'd much rather go for a walk, read a novel, listen to music, watch movies and talk face-2-face than read other people's blogs.

Task 9 - Library RSS Feeds

I think that when I am searching for feeds I experience what I term the "video store dilemma"; it is the same feeling that I get when I am at Video Ezy. I read reviews of movies, I have a list of movies that I would like to see but once I get to the video store and start browsing, every thought that I have had in my head disappears and I cannot remember what I am interested in looking at! I find searching the net and searching for feeds was the same - I look blankly at the screen and think "what am I interested in?" Maybe this is just telling me that I don't have many interests.

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?
As mentioned the browsing option was interesting but you need to go through an awful lot of info to find something appealing. I read lots of "human interest" stories but nothing that I have a burning need to know about.
It is also pretty easy to type into bloglines and let it find the feed for you.

Which Search tool was the easiest for you?
I liked Technorati the best.

I also just used the feed locator on some of the websites that I go to and linked to them via bloglines.