Your point is well-taken. I use Technorati tags for two reasons: first, in the hopes that my posts will become part of a larger conversation; and second, because as the semantic web evolves and becomes the norm, I'm hoping those tags will port into a larger universe of tagged posts.

Something I recently discovered is that you can't search back using Technorati past one month, so if you're looking for an older post, try delicious, reddit, or Google, because you won't find it on Technorati — I find that beyond frustrating.

Tagging aside, it seems that it's very difficult to be heard in the larger conversation anyway, because the loudest voices often don't wish to pay attention to the smaller ones. I cannot tell you how many times I've blogged something only to see it put out as some new idea two or three weeks later by one of those high-visibility guys. It's not that I care, but the least they could do is give some credit where credit is due.

I wish the “real” Google Alerts supported RSS.

It seems to me that with each progressive move you have made you are narrowing the number of people you could potentially reach. With tags - point outward not inward as you dependence of categories does - you can reach a wider circle. Then you reduced that to a shared feed which once more is dependent on people knowing what to do with it and wanting to add it to their reader.

Now you have reduced that circle even further by restricting yourself to strictly using Twitter for sharing linkage. How is the narrowing your field of available people doing anything to expand a conversation?