Over Two-Hundred Education & Science Blogs * † - Department of ...

6. More Inclusive Blog Directories With More Powerful Search Engines Are Needed
The search engines of International Directory of Edubloggers (IDE) (Donaghy, 2009);
Technorati (2009); Blogged (2009); and ScienceBlogs (2009), can do keywords searches ONLY
for blogs and for information in posts within blogs, for blogs that have been registered on their
servers, and (probably also) for Technorati and Blogged, relatively popular blogs. Of the
approximately 220 blogs listed in this compilation only:
a. 34 (15%) appear in IDE,
b. 11 (5%) appear in the ScienceBlogs Directory.
c. 136 (62%) have been given a TA rating by Technorati,
d. 38 (17%) have been given a BR rating by Blogged,
In my opinion, Blog Directories would be of more assistance if they:
(1) were more inclusive – as would occur if more bloggers would take a few minutes to register their
blogs at IDE, Technorati, and Blogged;
(2) featured more powerful search engines such as those provided by LISTSERV (see Appendix A1b
“Some Strengths of the ADLsphere”).
7. Other Social Networking Sites
a. Facebook
According to : “. . .a free-access social networking
website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can join networks
organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with other people.
People can also add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify
friends about themselves. . . . currently has more than 175 million active users worldwide.”
b. MySpace
According to : “. . . a social networking website with
an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos,
music, and videos for teenagers and adults internationally.. . . . the site counted approximately
106 million accounts on September 8, 2006”
c. Twitter
According to : “. . . a social networking and microblogging
service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as “tweets”),
which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's
profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can
restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). . . . .
In November 2008, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research estimated that Twitter had 4-5
million users. A February 2009 Compete.com blog entry ranks Twitter as the third largest social
network (behind Facebook and MySpace), and puts the number of users at roughly 6 million
and the number of monthly visitors at 55 million.”
d. LinkedIn
According to : “a business-oriented social
networking site founded in December 2002 and launched in May 2003[2] mainly used for
professional networking. As of February 2009, it had more than 35 million registered users,[3]
spanning 170 industries.”
e. FriendFeed
According to : “a feed aggregator that consolidates
the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites,
blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. Users can use
this stream of information to create customized feeds to share (and comment) with friends.” For
an example, see “FriendFeed Science 2.0 Room: for people interested in Science 2.0 and Open
Science, especially the use of online tools to do science in new ways” at
.
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