Technorati: Control or Communication?
I'm going to get geeky for a few minutes...
Thanks to 2000 Bloggers, which included my Z-list blog merely because I asked them to, I've seen my Technorati ranking go from somewhere in the hundreds of thousands (which I am led to believe is bad) to somewhere in the thirty thousands (which I am led to believe is not great but not bad). I've had the number of blogs linking to me jump from zero to around 100. Some calls this "link baiting," and Mack Collier over at The Viral Garden has this to say about that:

Amy Gahran says that 'link-farms' such as the Z-List and 2000 Bloggers are wrong, because they game the system, and skew Technorati's 'Authority-Ranking' results. Yeah they do, but that was kinda the whole point, the system was wrong to begin with and needed to be skewed. Some A-Listers might not agree with me, but any site/blog etc that applies 'authority-ranking' to determine that the content I produce here is better than your content, simply because I have more links than you do, is not only wrong, but evil, and goes against everything that's right with blogging.

My sentiments exactly. I put it this way: I currently make no money from this blog. And it's worth $0.00. I call myself a z-list blogger because there's no letter past z. But that's really what it's all about, right? Sure, I like seeing my numbers fluctuate like they have been doing. But right now, my real support comes from new friends who have read this blog, established bloggers who post comments, and the number of visitors I see nightly through Google Analytics. The controversy over at Technorati, with them getting all bent out of shape because 2000 Bloggers has screwed with their precious rating system - it seems to me they're talking out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, this explosion of Web-based individually-created content is seen as democracy on steroids (in a good way). Everybody can have a blog! Sign up for Technorati - claim your blog! Do it today!

On the other hand, their decision to block link counts from "linkbaiting" sites... well, I'm reminded of Ned Beatty's discourse to Peter Finch in Network:

"It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. THAT is the natural order of things today. THAT is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU WILL ATONE. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little 21-inch screen and howl about America, and democracy. There is no America; there is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today."

And Technorati.