#14. Technorati. I did find that searching Blog posts, tags and blog directories yielded different results. For the Learning 2.0 search directories were best, followed by tags. Posts were not very productive.

I looked at some of the popular searches and tags and I was surprised to see people (e.g. Cathy Seipp) and things I had never heard of (twitter) among the most popular. I was not surprised to see that the most popular all seemed to relate to technology and subjects younger people would be interested in. I looked at actual posts to see what they were about, but I am not really interested in any of the popular searches. Obviously, I am not limited to the most popular searches, but that's what you asked about.

I spent a lot of time looking at this site and I have to conclude that I am neither a blogger nor a blog reader. I do not want to tag my posts; I do not want to tell the world at large about me; and, although I did find some interesting things, they were not enough to draw me into spending my time looking at other peoples' blogs. I already spend enough time on Google looking things up and getting, for me, satisfying results (mostly without anyone's opinion thrown in.) I did get one glimmer of what might draw people to blogging: I got a comment from a complete stranger. It was a surprise, and slightly scary to me that a blog so obscure as mine was found by a stranger (since I am definitely not writing this for anyone but the originators of this project), but still it was a positive human contact and it carried its own positive charge.

Tagging, I think, is essentially the same as cataloging--not everyone is equally good at it. It helps you to find things that you want, but it surely isn't foolproof. With all the "information" out there you can still wade through a lot of stuff that isn't precisely what you're looking for. If I was willing to spend even more time I would try refining my searches with longer tags to see if anyone is trying to be more precise, but I'm only on #14!