Technoratti does not rhyme with spaghetti

We were introduced to Technorati today. I was confused - surprising since the website seems pretty straightforward. Is the search box on the main page searching the blog directory? Or the blog directory and posts? Or the blog directory, posts, and post tags? I do not know.
Our exercise was to search "Learning2.0" (I would have had a link here but could not find a suitable one - that in itself is interesting); first in blog posts, then in tags, and also in the blog directory (remember my confusion from earlier)
My results:
20.980 in blog posts
758 posts tagged
20.995 in the directory? This was searched in the search box on the main page
What if people don't tag their posts (I haven't :) ? What if the tags they use aren't ones I would have thought of? The results are so much larger if I search blog posts than if I search tags. And I don't think I searched the blog directory correctly because there are so many results. Hmmm...

Something else we were required to do was to check out the most popular blogs. Again, I was a little confused - is "Rising Posts & Stories" aka popular? Here you could sort by attention (aka popular) or by freshness (aka time/date posted). However, if you clicked on Blogger Central you had a choice of "Top 100 Blogs" or "Popular". The first was sortable by authority (who determines this?) or by number of fans. The second had it broken down into Top 100 By Fans, Top Searches, or Top 100 By Authority. Are they the same thing?

So, the most popular blog was www.boingboing.net. Seems to be a compendium of copyright issues, technology, internet, entertainment... I noticed that many of the top blogs talked about these topics, including blogging. Perhaps this one is the most popular due to the author's writing style? Maybe he's got a lot of friends? Maybe it's one of the older (and more established) blogs on these topics? Who knows. One of my favorites made the list, PostSecret! Different subject matter than most on the top 10.

One more thing - technology is such a broad, BROAD, term. It's like science - you could have science like astronomy, botany, the "science" of cooking, applied science.... I would like to find some narrower terms for technology related to computers, specifically internet.

PS: I was not in the mood to tackle the bonus assignment since I'm at the reference desk now and serving patrons - which leads my brain to sizzle out of my ears.