#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.

#13 mmm, full stops are yummy

I am going to race through this week's things as much as possible, because it has been a very busy week and I really don't have time to get caught up in tangents and exploration. Sorry.

I have run across delicious before. I hate the full stops. A lot. Not to mention the logic of the name completely escapes me. It probably doesn't have any, it's just one of those quirky things that someone thought was amusing. Ha.

Apart from that, it's one of those things that I can see would be useful, but I don't personally feel inspired to use it right now. I have certainly used other people's bookmarks in the past, and it can be a useful way of sharing information, particularly if one of the people you're sharing information with is a web developer who wants to show you some prototypes.

I gather one of my compadres has set up a delicious account bookmarking some useful sites we need all the time in Asknow, which strikes me as an excellent use of the tool. I plan to bookmark it in my browser, which is where I keep my bookmarks so that I don't have to remember where all the full stops go. Though I do have to back them up so that they don't periodically disappear when TSD upgrades my computer or I switch jobs or something. Hmm. Maybe I should come to terms with the indigestible full stops.