Day fifteen in the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger series was yesterday and asked us to look at Day 15: Find Thyself. Essentially, we were asked to search ourselves on Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Google.
Beginning with Technorati, interestingly when you search “Michael Barbour” (with the quotation marks) you find four of my former blogs when you click the blogs tab (including the former Blogspot version of Virtual High School Meanderings), but not this blog – which is kind of odd as I have six claimed blogs on Technorati (see http://technorati.com/people/technorati/mkbnl).
When I search Google Blog Search for “Michael Barbour” it brings up a whack of blog entries… Most of which are from this blog, and most of the others are actually ones about me.
Finally, when I do a search for “Michael Barbour” on simply Google it picks up a couple of us. There is a Michael G. Barbour plant ecologist at the University of California that it picks up first, but I am listed as the second person on the Google search. I’m also the fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth on the first page. Interestingly, it finds my old UGA homepage, one of my old blogs, this blog, my MACUL space page, and my real homepage (the one with my domain name). I should also note that there is a Michael T. Barbour who is he Director of the Center for Ecological Sciences for Tetra Tech, Inc. – and all three of us publish so we appear all over the place (and these other two are both in the sciences, maybe I missed my calling). When you do “Michael K. Barbour” it is all me, as I do try and publish, as well as create my Internet presence around my full name.
The last thing Steve talks about is making sure we are pinging Technorati with our blog. When I used Blogger, I would include the Technorati tags in the body of the message (see the bottom of We’re Moving!!! as an example). I was told that WordPress was supposed to do this natively, which was one of the reasons for the move. Unfortunately Technorati hasn’t picked up this blog. I have tags for each entry, I have claimed this blog on Technorati, I’ve done manual pings from my account on Technorati, I’ve even posted a message on the WordPress support forums trying to figure out the problem. But Technorati still doesn’t want to play with this blog.
Since this entry in the Thirty Days To A Better Blog process is about trying to resolve these issues, let me experiment to see if by adding the tags to the body of the entry Technorati will finally find me.
Tags: blog, blogging, blogs, 30 days, virtual school, cyber school, high school, education
