Week 6, Thing #14 Technorati

It’s nice to have a search engine for blogs. As conference speakers or authors and columnists who write in the print media now maintain blogs, the ability to quickly update your knowledge through blogs and postings is exciting. It is proving useful for one of my workplan assignments.

You could spend hours trying to figure out which search feature presents the best search results. Trying all the search options, I found that for Learning 2.0 the enclosing of the two words in quotes helped. My best search was in the Advanced search option using Keyword by exact phrase “Learning 2.0” and then clicking on blogs about Learning 2.0. However, trying other topics, this search strategy was not always the best. I found the Directory search not useful for searching at least 3 topics. The results were much too broad and resulted in finding many irrelevant listings. I need to play around with the search features more when I have time.

I was not at all surprised at one were the top blogs or favorited items. Global social networking is quite apparent as reflected in these listings.

For use in responding to customers, the authoritativeness of the poster or blog author must still be paramount. You need to be cautious in using blogs as resources. With some reservation it might prove useful to those seeking opposing viewpoints on a topic.