Thing #14 Technorati

Technorati is a way to find blogs. You can do all types of searches, including tag searches. If you have a blog, I suggest you register it with technorati so it will be more accessible to others. I also suggest saving your favorite blogs and adding tags. This site will even rate your blog, mine is pretty low so please show some love and add me as a favorite technorati blog. You can click on the button above.

I'm really loving all of this tagging. The more information you can attach to your favorite sites and blogs, the easier they are to find when you need to look for them again. Try to think of tags that make sense to you and anything and everything that comes to mind when you think of that website. By tagging you are just organizing the internet for you :) and others, but mostly for you! So the more work you put into the more you benefit from it. And tagging isn't really a lot of work, as I'm finding out. You can use del.icio.us and it will import all of your bookmarks - you can add tags at your convenience. You can also dowload tools for your tool bar that allow you save right to your del.icio.us account and add tags!! Try it, I promise you will love it!

Thing #14 Tagging and Social Bookmarking

I'm in love, no seriously in love!! Where have all these tools been hiding. Today I have been introduced to del.icio.us - what a cool tool. I can't wait to use it. Have you ever found a really cool website and bookmarked it to your favorites, but when you think about using it again, you can't find it in your thousands of bookmarks. Well I have, actually it happened just the other day. About a year ago I found a really cool idea to use a mailbox in my classroom. I wanted to give credit to the teacher who had the original idea, and I couldn't find it among my thousands of bookmarked sites. This is going to be so nice!! del.icio.us takes bookmarking sites to a whole other level. You bookmark sites, but you put tags on your sites so they are easy for you to find. But they aren't just on your computer, you can access these bookmarked site from work, school or wherever! Also you can share your list of bookmarks with other uses. Here are some ideas I think this tool will be useful in and out of the classroom.

Research projects - As students research projects at school they can bookmark their sites they have found on a site like del.icio.us - then they have access to everything at home they have found so far. No duplicating work or having to have students print out the websites they have found. I'm sure parents will love this!

Teachers gathering ideas for classroom - Let's say you are working on a unit. You can find ideas and resources and bookmark them on del.icio.us - you can search bookmarked sites by other teachers and double your info! Also you can switch between work/school. No need for separate bookmark lists. And other teachers can access the links that you have found - making it easier for them to plan their lesson.

I am so excited to get my bookmarks tagged. I already downloaded them to the site, now I just have to update tags so it makes it easier to find them.