Thunder

Following the two comments on my posting about web2.0 technologies I thought it would be worth explaining why I included Technorati.

Technorati has several features but its main function is that of a search engine for blogs, by using the simple search you can search either within blog posts or the posts tags, the advanced search has more functionality:

So why would I want to search using Technorati as opposed to the ‘all powerful’ Google? One reason is the order in which the results are displayed, Google ranks the results by the number of links to the page whereas Technorati ranks them in date order with the most recent posting at the top. Once you have got your technorati results you can then subscribe to the feed for the search results. Another reason could be that as soon as you post your article to your blog, as long as you ping Technorati, it will appear immediately if you search for it within Technorati, how long would it take for this post to appear in Google?

If you take the time to register with Technorati then you are able to make use of more functionality. Watchlists allow you to create and save searches - you can then check back at any time to see the most recent postings, this could be very useful in extending pieces of research.

Ewan McIntosh posted about the use of Technorati in his ‘Assessment is for Learning’ post back in June:

John Johnstone and his pupils blog over at Sandaig Primary School and they are teaming up with Hope Park Primary over their Roman Music project. The link was found by running a search for the term “Roman AND music” over at Technorati, the blog search engine.

More information on using technorati can be found on their ‘User Tips’ page.