Technorati, the 14th Thing

Well that was a surprise. Technorati's front page looks like MSN.com.

I thought it would be a very tech-oriented site, but...Jessica Simpson's new movie, nude

photos of Melissa Joan Hart, "worst iPod accessories"....I feel like I'm in the supermarket checkout line.

I started the process of claiming this blog, just for the sake of trying it, but the "quick claim"

feature asked me for the username and password I use on Blogger. Huh. I asked the guy from Ken's Space about it and he said they didn't ask him that. I'm sure lots of people have done it without incident but for now I'll wait on the claiming thing.

I wasn't able to view the Technorati tour screencast; it just wouldn't start. I did perform the discovery exercise but results were puzzling and seemed different every time. At the Front Page I searched the phrase "movable books" first without the quotes (868 results, where the 4th hit was 2 videos of movable books- great! Even thought the other 867 results were almost all irrelevant, I was happy to see the video results.) Then I searched with the quotes, got just 9 results, all relevant, very nice....but no videos. But...the videos had been labelled "movable books." Why did they show up in a search using two keywords presumably "anded" together, but not in a search for the phrase with which they were labelled? Searching the Blog Directory for "Learning 2.0" brings up lots of relevant results, but more general topics bring up way too much. I can hardly believe that out of 110 million blogs, only 6 posts in English are tagged "movable books," and only 31 are tagged "popupbooks." There's more, as it turns out, if you really work the spacing: pop up books, popup books. But there are those videos again! and more of them this time. So, it's a puzzlement. The advanced search feature is something I want to explore when I have more time and fewer things to complete before deadline!

Just one more thing about Technorati: is there a graphic designer in the house? Because that page is hard to look at. The layout is busy, the ads are intrusive and the there's a lot of type smashed awfully close together. But I guess when you're the only blog-rankin' game in town, folks are coming for the info, not for your looks.