Using Technorati to choose a blog to evaluate

In order to choose a blog to critically evaluate, the Technorati site was used. The address for Technorati is http://technorati.com/. I have not previously used this site but found it useful as there is the option of selecting the level of authority when searching through the directory. These ranged from any authority, high authority, medium authority and low authority. A search on "library literacy" with an authority level of medium, returned 8 blogs (search conducted on 15th March 2010).

The Hey Jude website was chosen for the evaluation because many of the tags for the site were of interest. Some of these included: information literacy, innovation, library 2.0, reading, reading and literacy, school library, techtools, education, innovation and school library.

The Technorati website also allows you to click on the writer of the blog and this highlighted that Judy O'Connell was the author of the site and listed four other sites that have been claimed by her. These additional sites were also based around schools, emerging technologies and web 2.0.

The site was listed with a green arrow going up and an authority number of 450.

In an attempt to find out how this number is generated I clicked on the "Welcome to the New Technorati"heading and then the Technorati Authority FAQ.

The site explained that it was redesigned in October 2009 and authority is now based on a scale of 0-1000. 1000 is the highest authority. Authority is based on: linking behaviours, categorisation and associated data. Previously the authority was calculated over a 6 month time frame but now it is over a short finite period.

Technorati was useful in the search of blogs as the authority was rated. This eliminated searching time.

The flashing adds were annoying but this is just becoming part of the many websites now. While in Technorati I did click on the "Ads by Google"heading. This said that the ads by Google appear on sites that use Google's AdSense program to show ads. Sometimes these will be based on the content of the page that is being viewed and other times it will reflect the interests based on the participating websites that have previously been viewed by the user.