Technorati

I'm enjoying using Technorati. I'd often wished for a way to search just blogs, and I was thrilled recently to discover the Google Blog Search. But that tool doesn't have very sophisticated search capabilities, and it was often like finding a needle in a haystack to pick out good posts by real people from among the irrelevant things that also seemed to turn up (like fake blogs and shopping sites). Technorati seems to have solved those problems by letting you search for either words in the blogs themselves or tags assigned to the blogs, which would seem to help narrow things down considerably. Blogs also accumulate "authority" by being linked to by other blogs, so you can kind of tell which blogs have been judged important by other humans.

I wanted to search for my own blog in Technorati, and I eventually did find it, but first I found a post that linked to my blog. It was from someone at another library (apparently a public library, judging by the context) also doing Learning 2.0 this summer. It was amazing for me to discover that other people are actually reading this! Hello to all of you, and feel free to leave a comment if you want to introduce yourself!