#14 technorati

I am currently starting up this post because the search blog posts for the phrase "Learning 2.0" is running in the other window. It's been about two minutes so far and I'm still waiting for the results.

Oh look, it just came up with an error message: "cannot find server". Let's try their "new streamlined server for lightning-fast, blog-only results". Well, that only took about 10 seconds. Slow lightning, but at least it didn't time out.

Except the results I got were instead for the term "tag". Huh. Weird. Second time round, it's worked properly.

Okay, comparison time: blog posts that mention "learning 2.0", unsurprisingly, outnumber the number of posts tagged "learning 2.0" (2931 vs 3). I would expect that blogs about "learning 2.0" would be more than tags, but less than blog posts. Let's see if I'm right. Oooh, the tension...

532. Yup. Interestingly, the number of blogposts with "some" authority mentioning "learning 2.0" is only 391. What's this authority thing? I know I said I wasn't getting sidetracked this week, but I am intrigued despite myself.

Oh, it's like a citation tracker. Okay, that's mildly interesting. I think it's kind of funny (in that way that's not actually amusing) that this reference tool for tracking the success of journal articles in an academic world has been applied to the vast realms of inanity spewing out of the blogosphere. Especially something like this, which doesn't actually measure authority at all—it measures popularity. I guess if it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for the world. Why do I feel like I'm back in high school?

I will decline to make my tags available to be searched by the world at large, thanks. It would be too depressing to find myself in the "no authority" category.