Edu-blogging, for me, is about connection, about dialogue, about giving voice and about engagement as contributor, observer, and critic. The use of a number of supporting applications is what gives edu-blogging its power, more so than just the blogging application alone.

Technorati - it is for me a central hub, aiming to collate and display summaries of blogging activity and information for bloggers on a global scale, and plays the role of a clearinghouse.

Tags from What’s Rising, a key section of Technorati, highlights the most popular main tags other bloggers have used to describe and identify their posts. Through the use of a cloud tag (a visual representation of the most used tags searched for, with the most popular appearing larger than others), you can get a quick view of the most common tags used within the blogosphere at any point in time.

Top Tags gives a summary of the top 100 tags used in all languages across the global blogosphere.

Technorati provides a directory of blogs that is always being updated.

You can set up your own watchlist by entering a few tags (keywords or phrases that summarize a contributor’s post on a blog) and then you can visit technorati to view on one page all the updates from all these blogs without having to visit them site by site. Thus the watchlist is a blog aggregator, a blog reader that collects links to updates from various blogs on one page.