Thursday, October 7, 2010

Technorati: a search engine I had no idea existed until now

     This post will cover the functionality of Technorati, a search engine which only searches for blogs and related content.  I will search for the topic of my informative paper, which is on regenerative medicine, and in doing so explore Technorati's capabilities.

     Upon searching Technorati for the phrase "Regenerative Medicine" I found no results.  When I changed the query to "Stem Cell Regulations" however, I encountered a blog entitled: The Blog of Legal Times (or the BLT) which contained an article on the recent judiciary blocking of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.  The blog has many authors, but I will list all of them anyways: , Carrie Levine, David Brown, David Ingram, Diego Radzinschi, Jeff Jeffrey, Jenna Greene, Jordan Weissmann, Liz Engdahl, Marcia Coyle, Mike Scarcella, Tom Schoenburg, and Tony Mauro.  It appears that the blog has been active since February, 2007, and the authors make 4-8 blog posts daily.  The authors do use hyperlinks, usually linking to news articles from other websites.  They also use an abundance of pictures and some videos, which they procure from news stations as well.

The link to this blog can be found here

      I then searched the same query again and found another blog entitled "Daily KO's: This week in science" whose author goes under the blogging alias "DarkSyde."  This particular post was written on Sept. 11th, 2010 in response to the judiciary block on funding for embryonic stem cell research.  The tone of the post is drastically different from that of a research paper, it is laden with not only slang terms, but with personal bias as well.  This is apparent in sentences such as "we had all hoped we were past this insane stem cell crap."  One would never write this informally in a research paper, nor inject this sort of sneering bias into it, and I'm saying this as someone who supports embryonic stem cell research.

The link to this blog can be found here

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