2. Technorati

a. Technorati is one of those online things that I had heard about, but never paid that much attention to.  So it was nice to finally figure out what it was by reading the Wikipedia article.  The summary was helpful; the rest of the article- not so much.  Basically, Technorati is a search engine for blogs that rates the blog's "authority".  A blog's "authority" is measured by the number of different blogs that link it.

b. After clicking around, I think that Technorati has its uses.  I like that if I was looking for blogs on politics or lifestyle, there's a quick and easy way to find the best of those categories.  I also like that once you find a blog you're interested in, it gives you a summary of the blog, the tags it uses most often, all of its rankings on Technorati, etc.

I don't like, however, that if you're looking for something outside their categories- weddings, for instance- there's no quick way to find them.  You can search for posts or blogs and it'll find them for you, but they're not sorted by authority, the way that the other blogs are.  It also doesn't just find you wedding blogs.  It will find you any blog having even the tiniest to do with weddings.  Photographers, personal wedding blogs- you name it, it found 5,317 of them.

I think, in general, I would use Technorati if I was looking for something specific, like a really great cooking blog or what political story was blowing up the internet.  That being said, I don't think I would use it all that often.