Week 6: #14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

A) Advanced Search Exercise -

I think I may now have a better understanding of Technorati. When I looked at it in exercise #9, I found it to be pretty confusing and a bit too techie for me. After doing the discovery exercises I now see how I can use Technorati to narrow a search for blogs on a specific topic.
I put the phrase "Learning 2.0" into the blogposts search and got 17,626 hits for blogs that contained Learning and 2.0. I then put the phrase "Learning 2.0" into the tags search and the hits reduced to 338 initial posts of blog sites specifically tagged "Learning 2.0". I later put the keyword phrase "Learning 2.0" as a tags search and found 616 hits. I tried this phrase in the tags search again and got 505 hits. I guess how many hits you get depends on how many bloggers are tagging a blog as "Learning 2.0".
I then put the keyword phrase "Learning 2.0" into the blog directory search and got 477 blogs about "Learning 2.0". I tried the exercise again in this search and got 405 hits for blogs about "Learning 2.0".
I learned from this exercise that to narrow the number of hits to blogs that are specifically tagged with your keyword term, it is best to use the tags search. Remembering that these are blogs that have been self-identified by the blogger with a specific tag. Some blogs may relate to a keyword such as "Learning 2.0" but not be tagged that way yet. To expand your search a bit to blogs that are about "Learning 2.0" but may not be tagged yet, you might want to use the blog directory search. To find lots of hits (many of which may not be that useful), you would want to put the "Learning 2.0" in the blog posts search because it will come up with many hits - though some of them may not be as relevant as you'd like.

B) Popular blogs, searches, videos -

I looked at some of these blogs,searches and videos, but I was not really interested in them. They mostly seemed to relate to popular culture topics such as celebrities and specialized blogger topics relating to technology and politics. I am interested in some of these topics, but I think I'd prefer to find information by going to official websites for celebrities or politicians rather than the popular blog items.