Week 14--Technorati

While I enjoyed using Technorati (and I even learned a little bit about Twitterati!), I prefer using Google Blog Search. For some reason, I really liked the easy-to-use interface that Google Blogs presents, especially compared with Technorati. While Courtney indicates that Technorati tracks over "55 million blogs as well as 11 million tags attached to images on Flickr and blog posts", I still think that Google Blog search is a more user friendly application and has a easier to use interface. When I use Technorati, I get distracted by the amount of viable searches, as well as the many different ways users can search for a particular blog. I was not surprised that searching for "Classroom learning 2.0" returned different results from "School Library 2.0", despite the fact that the concepts are seemingly similar. All in all, I enjoyed learning about tagging and the many different ways that libraries can incorporate tagging in helping library users. I do foresee some difficulty in persuading users to consider the advantages in some of these applications (especially with the less tech-savy patrons), however, the relative ease of usage does seem to present significant advantages for people. I can definitely see librarians using the features of tagging not just in the professional and personal sense, but also in helping patrons with day-to-day information quests. Certainly the fact that there seems to be a "spirit of sharing and community" in utilizing user-based tagging sites (as mentioned by Courtney), not to mention the low costs involved, it may just take some persuading and convincing to get users to try various tagging tools. I definitely will add the use of these applications to my librarian repertoire and consider the advantages of these in the future!

It's funny that the Courtney text mention the development of Penn Tags, a tagging system used by the University of Pennsylvania that allows users to bookmark/tag books, websites, library cataloging records, etc. I actually work at Penn and while I've heard of the term Penn Tags before, I was confused on just exactly what the tool was. The description provided by Courtney was sufficient enough to intrigue my interest and I assure you, I'll be checking Penn Tags out very soon!