Week 6, Thing 14

I found Technorati to be quite intriguing, not because it can be used to search blogs (although that it interesting), but because of at least one concept borrowed from academia and the parallels with searching an OPAC. The concept of authority is taken directly from the world of academics, i.e. the more folks cite you work in theirs, the more important you are within that field of study. At Technorati it's the number of blogs that link to yours that count, the more the better.

As far as searching is concerned, searching by tags will, of course, provide a much more focused and relevant results list. Essentially, tags searching and post searching have the same relation as subject and keyword searching in OPACs. I realise that this will be no revelation to any librarian, but I find it interesting how some ideas from librarianship have leaked into the rest of the world somewhat in disguise. I'm not sure what that proves, if anything, but it is worth remarking on. Maybe we are having some sort of impact, albeit a quiet one.