Thing 11

Since creating this blog for class is my only experience with blogging, I'm pretty much just learning as I go and winging it.  So far, it has been pretty easy and straight forward.  I'll admit that I am still not regularly looking at any blogs of any sort besides my own as I try not to fall too far behind and drown in the never-ending sea of schoolwork that seems ever-present.  When I read http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/, I felt like the blogger articulated my reasons for never having had any interest in blogs or blogging.  I am not interested in reading someone's soapbox rants, or as she calls them egotists.  I also don't want to read things people are writing just for the sake of writing.  I want to read things of substance and things that I can trust.  The internet has created a population of people, who regardless of knowledge level, proclaim themselves experts and preach their "knowledge" to anyone who will listen.  Anyone can post anything, so you have to be somewhat skeptical of things you may encounter. 
First, I tried the Google blog search tool.  One thing I thought was odd, was that when I typed in education, the links I was presented with were not what I have previously thought of as being blogs.  I typed in "education".  The first "hit" on the search page was for the U.S. Department of Education.  As I scrolled down the page, I found more links to other state departments of education (Virginia and California).  I was expecting to find links to blogs like http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/. 
The Technorati  site was a little too busy for my liking.  There were a lot of different things going on.  Pop ups kept appearing.  I exited this site as quickly as possible after searching "education".  The results that appeared here were more what I was expecting, unlike the Google search.  I also tried Blogsearchengine.org.  I liked this one as well.  It worked similar to the Google one.  It was very straightforward and took me to a list of results that looked like actual blogs after I searched "education".  After looking at these three ways to search blogs, I think the easiest is Blogsearchengine.org and my least favorite is Technorati.  Using these types of sites introduced me to a whole new world of information that I never even knew existed.  Now that I know how much is out there, I will be able to better take advantage of what the internet has to offer.  This exercise also showed me that my preconceived notion of blogs may have been too narrow.  Blogs, apparently, can encompass a much broader scope of information than I previously thought.  The  results from the Google blog search showed me many different types of websites that I had never considered to be actual blogs.