Thing 7: Blog searching

Today, I explored Technocrati.  Now, I must admit that I really like reading blogs. I feel that I can get an insider's opinion on current events and topics that I am interested in.  So, I really liked Technocrati because it helped me to discover some blogs that I think I will start reading.

First, I searched recent blog posts for "young adult fiction," a topic that interests me because I read and write young adult fiction. The top three posts returned to me were "Amazon Fan Fiction Division Inks Deal with Valiant Comics,"  "Neil Gaiman Quotes on Writing," and "John Irving Wins at Lambda Literary Awards." While these articles are interesting, it wasn't quite what I was looking.  I really want to find blogs about young adult fiction.  Next, I looked through the popular tags from the last month.  I did not find anything on "young adult," "fiction," or even "books." Finally, I looked through the blog directory.  It gave me a variety of topics from which to choose, and I selected the subcategory "Books"  underneath "Entertainment." The search returned a list of blogs about books for me to explore.  I found three that I really like,  The Broke and the Bookish, Book Riot, and  The Book Smugglers. . So, in searching for blogs, I found that using the blog directory worked best, versus using a tag or post search.  

However, I do believe that there are advantages and disadvantages to using tags. I found more relevant articles over education when searching with tags than I did looking for posts and through the directory. When I was looking through posts over education, I was returned with a number of results that did not really cover education in schools.  For example, the number one blog for education was one covering the rights of Muslim women. While this was an interesting blog, it was not what I was wanting to find. Also, looking through the number of blogs covering education was quite overwhelming. Using the "education" tags gave me more articles specific to primary, secondary and post-secondary education.  For example, I found this article called "Excellent Apps and Techy Tools to Aid Exams and Revisions."  I thought it was pretty relevant to our class. :)   While the sheer number of tags can be overwhelming, they can also present you with articles more specific to your interest.