Thing #3 Comparing the Blog Search Engines

Blogging and looking at blogs is still new to me, and in some ways seems like it could take a lot of time just picking a couple of blogs and keeping up with them. Is that what people do? I'm beginning to understand the usefulness of writing a blog, thanks to the Neflin 23 things project. If I were a teacher I can think of many things I would do with a blog...but as a library Circulation Specialist and Inter-Library Loan Tech, not so many uses. Putting my random thoughts out there makes me feel a little lame. Like, who cares? Besides me wanting to participate in the 23 things and it being a good way to keep track of all the things we are learning in this project I'm still confused.


Lots of people must have found a use for them though, since there are about 20 search engines dedicated to blogs. I am going to look at as many as I can today and perhaps I will figure out a use for these random writings. I'll be back later to blog about my findings. If anyone out there in cyberspace cares. I can't imagine.

Well, here I am back again after two hours of searching and looking at Blog Search Engines. As usual Google was my favorite! I found Technorati very cumbersome, I did mangae to "claim my blog" and to "ping my blog" although for the life of me I can't figure out why. Searching for Library Circulation in Technorati brought up 662 results but they seemed to consist of mostly irrelevant, disjointed information. Google turned up 124,878 for Library Circulation but then you had the option to sort them by "last hour", "Last 12 hours" etc. the information on the first page of results seemed like it was more on target.

I'm still confused about the significance of blogging or reading blogs as a tool. I understand some of the reasoning, like our "Library Director's Blog" where I work. It keeps everyone up to date on things happening in the library. But it seems most people just Blog for the sake of blogging and I don't understand that. Spending time reading other people's musings just seems a waste of time. I must be missing something, or expecting too much.