Technorati

Technorati has officially become a new time-waster. One of my favorite things is finding new blogs, particularly pop culture & humorous ones, and there’s a lot to choose from.

I checked out the top 100 blogs, and what surprised me was how many of them I would not have considered to be a ‘blog.’ Huffington Post is number one, and while it’s not what I would consider an unbiased or real ‘news’ site, I would not have pinpointed it as a blog. Same as tmz.com – it feels like a ‘news’ site all its own, not a blog, which I’ve always thought of as something done by one or more people who are there to express thoughts, spread humor, or share their opinions, and while a lot of blogs I read do make their writers money, I have never thought of a blog as being an enterprise. Its interesting to think really about how to categorize websites, because a lot of sites don’t fit into distinct categories.

I’ve visited quite a few of the blogs on the top 100 list, and so I went to go search the tags of Technorati. I found some interesting stuff under history, and though a lot would be useful to introduce to history students, I don’t know if technorati tags would be a good way to tell them to find such sites. A lot of stuff obviously isn’t academic, and some links went to things with “history” in the title but which didn’t actually involve history.

Overall, technorati is a great example of both the benefits and downfalls of tagging, and a great waste of time as well as a great resource of finding news. A site for everyone really!