Technorati

So the first time I did this exercise, I took really precise notes. I wrote down number of hits, relevance, my favorites blog titles, really and truly the whole nine yards, super meticulous. Then i lost that paper. So rather than trying to replicate my first experience I'm just going to tell y'all how I feel about technorati (from the heart this time). Honestly when I look at technorati i just feel tired. There's information plastered all over the place 1,000,000 gems of knowledge just waiting to be unearthed and treasured, cherished even. I'm sure I could spend my entire life on technorati and find more interesting blogs than I could count. I would also find an even more unbelievably vast quantity of poorly written blogs, boring blogs, innane blogs, absolutely worthless blogs and even downright wrong blogs. The easiest way for me to envision technorati in the physical world is as a giant search-able bus station. That is to say, imagine if I could go to some vast public place and call out a string of keywords and by doing this summon forth all people who had anything at all they would like to say about my set of keywords. Useful? Perhaps. I might be lucky enough to summon forth a Nobel prize winning scientist who happened to be in my bus station that day, of course he might have been summoned by my desire to know what "the best movie of 2007" was, a question which he might not be any better suited to answer than I am. That is the biggest problem with blogs. There is no guarantee that the bloggers (the person writing the blog) have any real expertise in the subjects they are writing on. Technorati does try to alleviate this problem by showing a blog's "authority" and number of fans. Authority records the number of times a blog is referenced by other blogs and a blog's number of fans just shows how many people like the blog enough to self-describe themselves as fans of it. While blogs with high authority and larger numbers of fans do tend to be better written there is no guarantee that these blogs have more accurate information, only more popular information. I feel like Technorati (and to an extent wikipedia as well) represents a democratization of information, it represents a situation where popularity trumps legitimacy and where the sheer weight of public opinion can dictate truth. Imagine the 15th century's technorati or wikipedia the vast mass of the populous could assure you that the earth was flat, their voices drowning out the educated elite that knew the earth to be round.

I'm sorry technorati. I didn't intend for this to turn into a mean spirited tirade against you, I actually do like the premise of the site. I just get nervous that people will look at this as a research tool, just because the library wants us to learn about it. It's not a research tool, but it can be an enjoyable way to spend an afternoon.