Technorati

Like Delicious, Technorati also has the capacity to be a research tools for libraries, if for no other reason that it is one additional resource one can turn to be fine lots of information on a seemingly infinite variety of subjects. This is particularly the case if one wants to see what the most popular blogs are at any given moment, the most popular searches in the blog universe, and the most frequently tagged blogs. Unfortunately, Technorati suffers from the same drawbacks as Delicious and arguably most of the Internet - a plethora of irrelevant information. So I don't expect under most circumstances that a librarian would turn to this as a first search for information. On another level, Technorati could be one more vehicle by which libraries market their services. By creating their own blogs and claiming them on this site, libraries could potentially increase their visibility on the web.

I did the "Discovery Exercise" in Technorati's blog posts, tags, and blog directory using "Learning 2.0" as a keyword search. The results were different both quantitatively and qualitatively as one would expect. For example, my search resulted in 7,765 blog posts, 902 blogs and 758 tags. But what I don't understand is why the total number of blog posts and tags changed with each page of search results that I clicked on. So when I clicked on the second page of search results for blog posts, the number changed from 7,765 to 9,633 and on page seven it decreased to 9,624. Similarly, with tags, the number increased to 965 on the second page of search results and decreased to 757 on page six. Apparently, the first page of search results doesn't reflect the total number of results as it should.