Thing 14: Technorati.

It's really easy to spend a lot of time just surfing related blogs, blogs that link to specific blogs, and on and on. It's a great way to look at blog content in an organic way, I think. I also added a few watchlists to keep track of popular search terms. I think I'll keep using it!

(One frustrating thing I'm running into with both de.licio.us and technorati at my work computer is that I can't download the browser tools that make it truly easy to use both services. For example, you can just click on a "post to de.licio.us" widget to add an interesting site, or when you're on a page you can click on a "technorati this" widget to see who's linked to that page. I'm just very lucky that I have a computer at home and can download browser tools to my heart's content and also take full advantage of these 2.0 tools.)

Some thoughts on tags - I think that tags are an interesting way to categorize content. My mentor shared with me her frustration that tags are so flat - no hierarchy, no concept of contextualized categorization. There's also no concept of a controlled vocabulary - so you see all sorts of variants on a particular concept. For librarians, who are used to MARC records and controlled vocabulary for subject headings, it all can be a tad frustrating. But it does give some sort of order to the massive world of blogged content and moreover, anyone can add tags! It's all very messy but democratic, and I think it's all very exciting.