Following the instructions from Rebecca for Week 4 Assignment, I have subscribed to four del-icio.us tags. They are: Buddhism in Hong Kong; Buddhist organisations in Hong Kong; Buddhism academic studies in Hong Kong; and Hong Kong Buddhist blogs.
Technorati Blog Post Search v Google Blog Search
A blog post search in Technorati on the first topic “Buddhism in Hong Kong” has come up with disappointing results. The top ones in terms of relevance are mainly travel blogs maintained by people abroad. They are not relevant to my final project. At Google, the top 10 results include this site for a psychology journal and this post by a Buddhist in the U.S.
The first 10 results from the search on “Buddhism academic studies in Hong Kong” include two posts in my blog. The posts are: 1 and 2. The rest are irrelevant. There was nothing much from Google blog search, but I followed its advice and created an email alert on this topic. Will wait and see any relevant messages sent to me on the next few days.
As for the search for blog posts of “Buddhist organisations in Hong Kong”, this one is the top choice. Because i t looks quite relevant, I have tagged it. Then a couple of my blog posts were in the list. There was nothing much from the Google search.
Finally, the first 10 results in the search for the “Hong Kong Buddhist blogs” indicate that the system did the search based on “”Hong Kong” and “Blogs” mainly. One of my posts in this blog was in the top 10 results again. All the others were irrelevant. Nothing relevant resulted from the Google blog search.
James Foust has outlined in his book Online Journalism the useful information resources for journalists. I used some of them, like listservs when I worked as an editor for a trade publication. For example, the Hong Kong Trade Development Council provides free subscription to its e-newsletter.
Based on my experience in the research for blogs related to my topic ”changes in Buddhism, Buddhist organisations and their activities since the handover”, del-icio.us and Technorati are useful additional tools. They have enabled me to expand the scope in my search for relevant blogs and sites under the four sub-categories above. An example is the search helps me discover social tags as described by Mr Weinberger in his article “Tagging and Why It Matters?” . By tracing this tagged site of the Po Lin Monastery, I have found that four people other than me have saved and tagged it. I have gone further by clicking one of them and found that a Yorick Chan has tagged a total of 35 items under Buddhism. This represents so much more information that is potentially relevant to my topic. In addition, I have subscribed to the del-icio-us tag RSS feeds for the 4 sub-topics and I will monitor how they might help over the next few days. I have also subscribed to Technorati search RSS feed for CEPA in Hong Kong and it has been sending me new relevant blog posts.
For the moment, I have only started exploring the advantage of del.ico.us and Technorati and I have yet to identify any drawbacks.
1 response so far ↓
1 Rebecca MacKinnon // Mar 8, 2007 at 1:21 am
Nice job. It’s very interesting, some classmates are finding technorati and del.icio.us very useful, and others are finding them not useful at all, depending on their topic.
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