Technorati and Tags

I have to admit, Technorati is a lot less intimidating than del.icio.us. I actually kind of liked Technorati (which isn't to say I disliked del.icio.us, but you read my last post and know how it gave me heart palpitations at the sheer size). My favorite thing about Technorati by far is their search capability. I love that you can search for keywords that appear anywhere within a post, tags that are attached to a particular blog entry, or blogs that are simply categorized about one specific subject. It's one of the most handy search features I've come across, and I played around with it for a good long time.

Since Blogger automatically has tags that can be picked up by Technorati, it eliminates the need to really put in the specialized html tags that will allow Technorati to "catch" the post. (I'm still not sure what the proper lingo is here...so it will "ping" Technorati when a new post goes up? No clue.) I'm not sure I like the idea of my blog being registered and made public for the whole world. I've been blogging for a long time, but I've always locked my posts for friends only, so the idea of having a public journal that is easily found via blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search is kind of scary. I suppose if I were publishing a blog that was meant for mass consumption, that would be one thing - I would be glad to have it registered with sites so I could get a lot of traffic. But when it's just me playing around and musing about technology, I don't feel like it's necessary for everybody and their brother to be able to find my blog.

Nevertheless, that's just the way of the internet, I know, and perhaps being online for more than a decade has made me properly suspicious and overly cautious about making myself findable on the internet. I have a huge online presence on many sites, but I know how to protect myself against being searched and found, and I try very hard to keep myself shrouded because there are a lot of crazies out there. My goal is to only allow myself to be seen where and by whom I want to be seen. It takes a lot of diligence, but I think I manage to do it fairly well, and that's one of the primary reasons I don't like having a billion subscriptions to so many different sites. The more subscriptions you have, the harder it is to keep track of them and make sure you don't accidentally have your name or your location somewhere you don't want it to appear. There are plenty of decent people out there surfing the net (not just the crazies), but I'd still rather be safe than sorry.

I'm getting off track though. Technorati is a great site, and I think it's really useful for searching the blogosphere. Easy to use, fun to play with. This was a pretty enjoyable activity.