that techno beat (thing #14)

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 under visited! Hopefully registering in with Techorati will change that in the future. hehe

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 :)