A while back I referred to Shibboleth—the idea of putting an arbitrary string into a post for search engine recognition. “Blog chalking” apparently uses this technique to map the blogosphere to terrestrial geography. Basically, you enter geographical and demographic information into the Shibboleth generator. It spits out a string which is encoded in an HTML tag that you put on your web page. You can then Google the string to find other blogs whose authors have similar geographic and demographic characteristics. So I could find out who has a blog in my town, for example. The Blog Chalk people claim that doing this also raises your profile in the search engines, though I have yet to find an explanation of why this is so.
At any rate, I think this is a cool idea and would love to see it applied to the edu-blogosphere. I’d like to be able to, for example, search for all blogs by ESL teachers, or all bloggers in the NYC area who are interested in Open Source educational software.
Who knows? Maybe the urge will strike Stephen when he returns from Australia….
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