Thing 14: Technorati

Technorati was a really good way of searching for blogs and blog posts. You can search for individual posts that have been tagged with a particular subject or you can search for whole blogs related to your topic of interest. This is good because if you only searched for whole blogs, you might miss out on a good individual post on a blog that might not be completely dedicated to that subject. I checked out the top blogs and searches. For the most part the top blogs and top favorited blogs were pretty much the same, just not necessarily in the same order. Most of the topics included news and computer stuff. Top searches included more news searches, parenting, and youtube. About half of the searches were in other languages that I couldn't read, but I think that says a lot about how globally popular this site is. With the rapidly growing number of blogs out there, I think this tool is going to be very useful for libraries if it isn't already. However, it is going to also be very important to educate patrons (especially children and teens) about blogs and make sure they know that information found on blogs may not always be reliable and teach them how to choose reliable blogs.