Spent some time on technorati - looking over their advanced search features and putting a claim in for my own blog :)
Couple of things that jumped out at me that I appreciated;
1. user reviews - again a very useful feature in determining which sites will warrant investigation is the "authority" feature.
2. advanced searching features - the ability to search blogs by boolean search strategies - or thru browsing how the blogs themselves have tagged their areas of coverage.
3. self tagging - really liked the way I could assign tags to my blog to bring users interested in particular issues (in my case libraries, information science, and internet technologies).
As for some of the results I obtained while searching - I found that using "learning 2.0" as a search term - even an exact term - didn't reveal that many hits from our blogging experiment. A tag search with the same term revealed a lot more hits - along with a revelation that there were some busy bees that have already finished the 23 things in an explosion of impressive effort ;)
And my own humble batgirl blog? Well let's just say that after sorting through pages of search results (with the optional authority limiter set to "any authority") i was still only able to find my blog using the "blog search" feature in advance search mode - and with the limiter of "fresh" blogs... I guess it has been a bit naughty - but still undervisited! Hopefully registering in with techorati will change that in the future. hehe
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
mucho del.icio.so (thing #13)
After poking around on the del.icio.us site for a while - I could see how it would be useful to have a tool like this at our disposal as librarians...
Part of the problem with search engines is that they use algorithms for ranking website relevance that may not be a true indication of a site's usefulness to certain audiences, or an accurate analysis of a site's content.
The reason for this is that sites which are very image rich - and may be sparse in meta tags - might still be very worthwhile - and search engines like Google would possibly miss them because they were looking for certain criteria (like target word occurence or other factors) and sites which have a big visual component may suffer in their rankings.
I did appreciate the democratic feel of user reviewed sites and links - and seeing the statistics regarding user bookmarks is definitely helpful in determining which sites are worthwile - because other people have taken the trouble to catalog and document their experiences at the web site or link.
All in all - del.icio.us is most helpful in adding a dimension of depth to a search engine's finding that would otherwise cost me valuable time in research myself :)
Part of the problem with search engines is that they use algorithms for ranking website relevance that may not be a true indication of a site's usefulness to certain audiences, or an accurate analysis of a site's content.
The reason for this is that sites which are very image rich - and may be sparse in meta tags - might still be very worthwhile - and search engines like Google would possibly miss them because they were looking for certain criteria (like target word occurence or other factors) and sites which have a big visual component may suffer in their rankings.
I did appreciate the democratic feel of user reviewed sites and links - and seeing the statistics regarding user bookmarks is definitely helpful in determining which sites are worthwile - because other people have taken the trouble to catalog and document their experiences at the web site or link.
All in all - del.icio.us is most helpful in adding a dimension of depth to a search engine's finding that would otherwise cost me valuable time in research myself :)
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