Exercise 14: Technorati and tags

Exploring Technorati at the least has given me some additional insight into the reality that as print and network news sources struggle to maintain readers and viewers, the blogosphere just continues to expand at an astounding exponential rate. Hard to believe that so many people want to be connected so much of the time, but then again we're talking about those denizens of the globe who are entrenched in an online existence and define themselves as such. While there still exists a very clear "digital divide," I believe that another separation is becoming quite prominent and that relates to how and what people are accessing online. How bloggers and the virtually connected utilize the web is still by and large vastly different from those still contentedly putzing around the web in more rudimentary (not meant as an insult) ways. Technorati is a great tool for searching the blogosphere and happening upon information that resides somewhere in the world between search engines like Google and traditional news sources and combined with del.icio.us it offers a simple combination of information gathering through the options of social bookmarking and tagging. My only problem with tags, however, is that the user driven definition of a tag can be almost anything according to the individual's preferences. There is no uniform terminology and thus it seems that searching by tags can be as random as can be expected by that lack of uniformity. This, I imagine, is where del.icio.us and folksonomies come into play in an attempt to create connections and group consensus or aggregations of info. At times, I'm not even sure I understand what I'm trying to communicate, and I apologize for that, but that's what is making this whole 2.0 exercise intriguing.