Thing #14- Technorati and Tags

http://www.technorati.com/ is a website that keeps up with all the blogs out there in the mighty blogosphere and determines authority based upon how many hits the blog has gotten. You can view what are the top blogs and even the top topics of the moment. It even has a section for following twitter posts called Twitterati. "Twittorati tracks the tweets from the highest authority bloggers, starting with the entire Technorati Top 100 and soon including many more of the web's most influential voices." You can see the latest tweets and blogs from the these writers all in one spot instead of following links. You could use this in the classroom to follow specific topics and get the blogs on that topic all on one page. :)

Thing #13-Tagging and Discovering Delicious

OMG! Delicious is so addictive. It is a website where you can bookmark your favorite websites and tag them. Tagging is basically giving one word descriptors to help you "file" something. Amazon.com is famous for their tagging. With Delicious you choose the tags that you want. There are often reccommendations but you are free to create your own tags so that you can search for the items when needed. For example: DeweyBrowse.org is a website that has links to other websites that are catalogued according to the Dewey Decimal System. I tagged it under the following tags: library, cataloging, Dewey, library, kids, links, research, school, websites, resources, and DeweyDecimalSystem. These are all ways that I would used to search for this website again. It is like a personal search engine of my "favorites". There is a program that if you use internet explorer as your browser to easily download all your favorites. I was not that fortunate. I have been using AOL for forever it seems and had favorites bookmarked that I wanted to add to http://www.delicious.com/. I had to enter all the favorites "by hand"---copying and pasting URLs and labeling the tags. I was so OCD about it one night I stayed up until 3 am. It took me a few days to do, but it is finally done! On the plus side, I was able to check links to see if they were still hot and some were definitely not! And then I also wondered what was I thinking when I saved some of them in favorites, because they definitely weren't ones I went back to much.