Authority

Last Thursday I published a post regarding Technorati and my current ranking. Obviously, Technorati was listening (HA!), because they changed their blog ranking system on Friday. Now, they apply an attribute called "Authority" which indicates the number of blogs that have linked to your blog in the past six months. If your blog has no links from other blogs, then you have no Authority. If you have no Authority, then you remain unranked.

You may have also noted that I received a nice little comment from someone for my Technorati post. It's always nice to receive comments, but generally, I only get them from my father. Does this mean that someone else actually looked at my blog? I doubt it.

Here is my hypothesis regarding what happened... You may notice that at the bottom of each post, there is a series of "labels". I directed Technorati to "ping" my blog after I published the Technorati post. Technorati scanned the entry and its labels. Then they published my post on a feed to anyone subscribing to those labels. The commenter was hoping perhaps to reach someone desperately trying to increase their Technorati rating.

Why would someone want to increase their Technorati rating? If you can generate more traffic to your blog, you may be able to generate more revenue from the ads that are displayed in your blog. That, or perhaps, it's just to pump up your blog ego (blego?).

For today's experiment I will use the same labels and see what happens...

Regardless, who all have blogs with lots of "Authority"? Hmmm... maybe "Authority" is a misnomer...