Technorati

I have never done anything on Technorati, so this was a good experience for me. I noticed that although all the categories had  over 10,000 links, the entertainment blogs were definitely the most represented among the categories. I was surprised to see that the science category had some of the lower numbers, it also seemed odd to me that the science category wasn't broken down into smaller sub categories, which is what I would expect.

I like that you can search blogs or blog posts but i think that searching through blog posts is much more effective as sometimes blog names don't correlate with their subject matter.  For instance, I wanted to read more about the silk road which is a drug trafficking site available only by using TOR and going into the deep web ( have no fear Anne, I am not looking to purchase any opium, it is just very interesting to me). When I searched silk road using the blog search I got zero results, but when I changed to posts I was able to find some posts that related to what I was interested in knowing more about.

Technorati definitely seems like a great way to keep up with some more popular blogs as well as a great way to discover new blogs.

Diigo

Diigo seems like a really awesome tool. I definitely have always wanted a tool to be able to highlight and annotate the information that I consume on the internet, it has been frustrating to not be able to do that because I end up losing information or not remembering some of the things that I have found. I really like the tagging that is available on Diigo, it seems like a much more efficient way to organize book mark. I also think it is awesome that you can mark things as unread and keep of list of them ready to access. Tagging also seems like a great way to be able to collaborate with other educators. I found the tag edchat to be really interesting and useful. Similarly, the ability to tag and share those tags would be great for compiling links for teachers, for instance if a history teacher asked you to help her find some primary sources for WWII, you could easily find and tag websites that have that content and then direct her to the tag.

I also think Diigo is a great professional development tool. While I browsed I found evidence of so many educator related tags and articles. It is a wealth of information that is easily accessed and categorized.

I will definitely be using Diigo's annotation tools and tagging tools and look forward to using it to share links with teachers when I have a library of my own.

Library Thing

I really like Library Thing, many moons ago I had a Library Thing account and I couldn't seem to find it to revive it. It is too bad because it might be fun to go sort through some of the books I was reading back then. That is one of the coolest things about Library Thing, I don't know about you but I have a really hard time keeping track of all of the books I have read. Just the other week I borrowed a book from my mom's library, started reading it only to realize that I had read it already! Library Thing is a great tool for remembering what you read as well as keeping track of what you read. I think it is a great idea to put a widget like this on your school blog so that your students know what you have been reading.

 Another really good way to use Library Thing is to see what other librarians are reading that maybe you haven't been introduced to yet. It is a minor form of collaboration if you think about it, through the review function you can figure out what sort of content is in it as well as if it is a good book or not.

You can find my Library Thing account here.

Image Generator

This is the image that I created, because I love to read!