Thing #14

Thing #14: Technorati and How Tags Work

Well, while I was intrigued by the possibilities of del.icio.us, I found Technorati to be a bit chaotic. I'm sure it's very helpful for bloggers who want a wide audience, but I found all the ranking and tagging to be distracting. It's nice to have the tags in order to search for a specific subject on the blogosphere, but of course if you want to do that there's always Google Blog Search, which in some ways is far more thorough. (A search for "linguistics" gets 11 hits on Technorati, and 638,000 on Google Blog Search. "Newbery" has zero results on Technorati, but 148,000 on Google. "Three musketeers" gets 6 on Technorati, while GBS gives 243,000. Hey, apparently they're making a 2011 movie! Sweet.)

Technorati's main strength seems to be tracking which blogs are "hot" right now, based on who's linking to them, and which blogs are losing influence. A sort of Billboard for the blog business, I suppose, and indubitably of intense interest to industry insiders, but - in my opinion - not so necessary to those of us who look for specific content for one-time perusal.