TechnoratiTopDog meme

Here’s my answer to the TechnoratiTopDog meme, as tagged by the Rambling Librarian. Took me a while to do because Technorati was really, really slow each time I tried to get my data.

1. Make sure you’ve claimed your blog on Technorati and given it 20 relevant tags
(Instructions for doing this)
Confession time: although I claimed my blog on Technorati ages ago, I hadn’t bothered to tag it, until this meme. I guess I didn’t know what this blog was about at the time, or something. Choosing terms to describe this blog was an interesting exercise. I ended up with 18 tags: academic librarian, academic libraries, academic library, Australia, Australian, culture, games, gaming, language, languages, librarian, librarianship, Perth, Perth librarian, university libraries, university library, Western Australia, writing.

2. Go to Technorati Blog Finder.

3. Search for the tags you’ve given your blog.

4. Write down how well you rank in that area (it’s listed by authority).
This was amusing. The first tag I searched for was ‘academic librarian’. There is only one blog with this tag on Technorati at the moment! I know there are lots of other academic librarians blogging out there, so I guess they either haven’t tagged themselves on Technorati, or they’re using different tags…

5. Rinse and repeat until you exhaust all your relevant tags.
‘academic libraries’: 2 of 4
‘academic library’: 1 of 5
‘Australia’: 59 of 414 (I had to browse through the listing to find myself)
‘Australian’: 13 of 73
‘culture’: 290 of 1231
‘games’: 131 of 1142
‘gaming’: 50 of 497
‘language’: 34 of 185
‘languages’: 8 of 39
‘librarian’: 14 of 64
‘librarianship’: 9 of 24
‘Perth’: 7 of 31
‘Perth librarian’: 1 of 1!
‘university libraries’: 1 of 2
‘university library’: 1 of 2
‘Western Australia’: 4 of 13
‘writing’: 311 of 1414
(Results from 12 January 2006. Some tags have had minor increases since then.)

6. Blog the results, tag “technoratitopdog” and pass it to three others.

This was an interesting exercise. Because I hadn’t tagged this blog before it prompted me to think about what this blog is about. (Which for me raises the question, again, of the self-indulgence of blogging, but I’ll leave this for another post.)

Obviously, the more uncommon your tags are the more prominent you’ll be. Or will you? If no one else uses the terms you have chosen, presumably the likelihood of other people choosing to use those terms to search are also lower – so will people actually find you? (But where are all the academic librarians? And I know I am not the only librarian in Perth who blogs!)

This exercise showed me how usage of terms can be quite culture or location-specific. I remember talking about ‘gaming’ in libraries with a couple of work colleagues, and they both looked blank – they were thinking about the other common usage of the word ‘gaming’ which refers to gambling – and not the practice of playing games on the computer. And I didn’t choose to use the tag ‘university librarian’, because a university librarian is quite a specific job description, usually referring to the head librarian of a university library. I have been described as a university librarian (librarian + works in a university library = university librarian) before, but I (and most other librarians in my position, I suspect) prefer the term ‘academic librarian’. This term isn’t always meaningful to non-librarians, so I chose to use the terms ‘university library’ and ‘university libraries’ because that is my brand of academic librarianship.

Hmmm… who to pass this on to? As Kevin, the originator of this meme himself, notes, this is a somewhat complicated meme to do, and does rely on you having the inclination to tag your blog on Technorati in the first place. Only three others? How about lis.dom, Mooiness, and re|me? And if you can’t bear the thought of going through all the steps to get your blog listed on Technorati (although it’s not that bad, just needs a bit of time and consideration), how about thinking of up to twenty terms that you would use to describe what your blog is about?

Categories: technoratitopdog, meme