Technorati

I played around with Technorati for a while. As far as I can tell the search function for blog posts and tags have been collapsed into one search box so there really is no difference now in doing a keyword search in tags or blogposts. One of the design features of the site that I really like is their "front page" which is divided up into sections much like you would find in any daily paper. This makes finding posts of popular stories for the day very intuitive. Same for the blog directory, a kind of Yellow Pages for blogs.

Not surprisingly, searching recent top tags and blogposts many have to do with the election. Barack Obama was the second most popular tag, second to the not so helpful "news". The most surprising thing perhaps was when I looked at the most popular searches they didn't match up at all. The most popular tags as detailed above had to do with the election and politics. Many of the most popular searches were related to pop culture, which is somewhat discouraging.

The number of blogs being tracked by Technorati is overwhelming. With all its handy features though, especially with the ever increasing speed of information on the Internet, Technorati makes it easy for you to get a kind of snapshot of the zeitgeist of the blogosphere.

While like the spirit of blogs and having a more democratic form of journalism, blogging as a whole is certainly not without its negatives i.e. the role many blogs have recently played in whisper campaigns spreading unsourced rumors and innuendo in our recent election. It goes to show that information literacy and being able to recognize credible sources is perhaps more important than ever. Unfortunately, this is a skill that seems to be in short supply.