Saturday, July 7, 2007

Week 6, Thing 14


Technorati
is an amazing site for getting information from blogs. As I worked through the discovery exercise the one thing that really stood out is how very current the information is. The results of identical searches just a few minutes apart have clearly different results.
When I did the "School Library Learning 2.0" I got the following results:
  1. Posts 119 hits
  2. Tags 1,097 hits
  3. Directory 7 hits


In working with tags I have come to the conclusion that tagging is important and helpful but should be done with much care. This is the way others find what is in your blogs, photos, etc.
I need to go back and edit most of my posts so that the tags are helpful to me as well as others.
Tags are an excellent example of GIGO, "Garbage In Garbage Out".
Wikipedia article on GIGO
As the article points out this term is somewhat archaic because most applications have written into the code ways of filtering out "garbage" i.e. information that does not make sense. However, with the use of short tags and everyone contributes technology I think it may be time to resurrect the concept.

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