So now that you’ve been blogging for a while, you may wonder how big the blogosphere is. According to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, there are almost 1 million blog posts a day.http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/
These numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries.
How do you sort through the millions of available blogs to identify the ones worth reading? The blog search engines allow you to plug in your search terms and subscribe to the feed. Each blog search tool offers a variety of features. You can search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).
And how does a person get their blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a blog search tool? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured due to the fact that you're already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But using Technorati, you can have your blog officially listed and take advantage of other features by claiming your blog. You can also add a little bit of HTML code to your posts to tag posts with Technorati tags.
1. Explore Technorati and one other search engine mentioned in one of the Search Engine lists located in the Resource section.
2. Try the same search in both search engines. Are the results different?
3. Compare the features of the two search engines.
Resources:
Blog Search Engines: The Complete Overview (Search Engine Journal)
Directory of Blog Search Engines to find Blogs (About.com)
Blog Search Engines (About.com)
Blog Prompts:
Create a blog post about your discoveries.
How do the features such as results relevance, search options, other features compare?
