I subscribed the feeds in Technorati and Flickr with tag “homosexual”. Flickr is really a great photo sharing website and it listed the top ten most popular people tagged “homosexual”. Although it’s quite pity that there are no results with both tags “homosexual and Hong Kong” (so that I can’t get any photos from Hong Kong on homosexual), it actually provides hundreds of amazing photos of homosexuals from different places.

Since there were no other classmates working on the same topic as I , I chose three “leads” from the feeds that I subscribed from “delicious” several days ago.
First comes from the feeds with tag “homosexual”
Magazine publisher accepts Christ, leaves homosexual lifestyle
Lead: The publisher of Venus Magazine, a 13 year old periodical for homosexuals of African-American descent, announced on the magazine’s website that she has become a Christian and now rejects the lesbian lifestyle she has lived for her “entire adult life.”
It’s an interesting story, because the publisher was an aggressive, creative and strategic supporter of gay and lesbian issues in her last 29 years, but now the religion changes such a solid belief of her. It reminds me that I can pay attention to the religion power among the homosexuals in Hongkong and I can do some interviews to get the attitude towards homosexual issue from Christian in Hongkong.

Second is from the tag “homophobia”
Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal?
Lead: New study links homophobia with homosexual arousal questions whether it is latent homosexuality or a response to anxiety.
This is a study published in Selfhelp Magazine. It does attract me since I have never thought about the topic in this study before. It told me the other possibilities of where the homophobia comes from. In fact, the homophobia in Hongkong is still serious, but according to this article, the reasons of hates or anger to homosexuals are complicated. So it’s possible for me to talk with some people who are homophobia and try to find the real reasons that they hold the opinion, maybe I will get some different answers as expected.

The last one is about the tag “aids”.
HIV Study Raises Caution about Circumcision
Lead: Men with HIV who get circumcised hoping they will be less likely to transmit the AIDS virus may have a greater-than-normal risk of infecting their partners if they resume sexual activity too soon after the operation.
It’s the hottest news about HIV these days. I didn’t pay much attention to specific health issues about HIV in the past but in fact, it’s really a big problem among homosexuals. This news reminds me that I may do some research on HIV situation in Hongkong among homosexuals and I may interview the social workers on HIV organizations and some homosexuals about how they received the advanced information about HIV and disseminate them to the others in Hongkong.

It’s the very first time for me to tag the online content via delicious. After creating an account in delicious, I searched several articles including blogs on the topic of homosexual in Hong Kong. At first, I posted an article from In-media titled “legitimatize of homomarriage” with tag “homomarriage”, a news report: “HK records 373 new HIV cases in 2006”from People’s online with tag “AIDS” and a blog named “homophobia in Hong Kong” with tag “homophobia”. I searched with the tags in delicious and got a lot of information about the latter two tags but for tag “homomarriage”, no item except mine turned up in delicious. Thus I changed the first tag “homomarriage” to “homosexuality” and I got several pages of articles. And at last I subscribed to the feeds of the three tags to my Google reader.

This experience gives me a chance to touch the advances of tagging and at the same time, the limitations of the “latest craze among digeratii”. To me, the most outstanding point of tagging is that it personalizes the online searching. As Google reader makes people’s online reading more individually, compared with traditional online searching, tagging meets individual needs and provides more valuable information to the taggers. Because those tags are added after taggers reading articles, blogs and so on, that is to say, the information, say, from “delicious” has already been selected and filtrated by readers. It’s really a next-stage or advanced stage research method.

And moreover, this technology shares the searching contributions among all the taggers. “Users can see not only everyone else’s bookmarks, but also all the bookmarks tagged with a particular word.” As David Weinberger said in “tagging and why it matters” that tagging is social, tagging really makes full use of the great future of internet: “sharing” and develops it as a convenient and informative tool for people to do research

But on the other hand, from my own experience by using tag, this personalized search engine also has its limitations like most technologies. Tagging is based on the individual tagging behavior, that is to say, if nobody adds the specific tag, the others will get nothing from the website when she/he does search with the word. As I mentioned at very beginning, when I searched with tag “homomarriage” in delicious, I got nothing except my own bookmark. So it quite possible for researches to miss some information by relying on tagging.

The assignment of this week also gives me a chance to compare the differences between different searching engines. Firstly, I searched for “homosexual in Hong Kong” in both Google and Technorati. From Google, I got 1,170,000 results with these key words in 0.63 seconds. It includes all websites, articles which have both “homosexual” and “Hong Kong”. And then I used the Google blog search and input the key words, this time I got 1,610 blog results. Google blog is sorted in time order, and we can choose the blog according to the published time, like last hour, last 12hours, last day etc.

As to the Technorati, I did the same search. I also got a long list about related blogs, but I don’t know the specific numbers of those blogs (which Google blog search provides). The list from Technorati is quite different from the Google blog search’s results (I don’t know why) and the latest blog on this topic of Technorati is published 19 days ago, while, Google blog provides the latest blog published in Feb 27th 2007.

It doesn’t mean that Technorati is useless in our research. It offers more detailed information about the blogs. For example, it marks that how many other blogs link to the blog and I can access those blogs which is linked to my search result. So if I find one blog linked by many other blogs, it more or less demonstrated that the content of this blog draw more people’s attention, which really save my time when I am looking for related content.

Another interesting thing of Technorati is that it provides a graphic which illustrate the numbers of blogs contain the specific key words. For instance, when I search the “homosexual in Hong Kong”, it shows a graphic with introduction “Posts that contain homosexual in Hong Kong per day for the last 30 days.”I can use this function to know the general trend of this topic in blogs and it’s really helpful for doing research.

Except the websites and tools I mentioned today, there are more and more advanced technologies in internet world today. But honestly speaking, most of these new tools are of limitations and it’s not a good idea for people to overly rely on these tools. For journalists, convenient search engine will give us more information and meanwhile more challenges when we chose and quote from these sources.