Must be something about Mondays - once again reality doesn't quite live up to my expectations based on the lesson's description. Technorati's Discover and Popular features are not available, and the note about the "New Technorati" was posted in October, 2009. Other features seem to be functioning.
Using Technorati, I searched for "School Library Learning 2.0" and found nothing; I dropped the 2.0 and had better results, especially when I used their "refined search". I found more when I used Google's blogsearch feature. If you want to find blogs using the other search engines mentioned, you will need to add "blog OR blogs" to your search string. I'll probably stick with Google in the future.
There was a story on the evening news a few years ago where they were interviewing some people from Google; it was the anniversary of some significant date in the company's history, I think. Talking about how hard it can be to find what you want and how Google was developed to make it easier, one person said something to the effect that the internet would be a lot better if librarians had been in charge of it from the beginning.
I can't help thinking that whoever started promoting the use of "tags" was channeling the spirits of all those early librarians that we learned about in our first cataloging classes. Tags help to optimize the work of a search engine, just as subject headings in a MARC record enable us go straight to the library shelf we need instead of wandering through the whole room. The disadvantage to tags is that everybody has their own versions, so you miss things unless you use lots of variables when you search. Sounds kind of like what inspired Minnie Sears to make her List of Subject Headings, doesn't it!
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