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Dan Hill continues a theme expressed by others (Andrea Weckerle, Shel Israel, Doc Searls, Chris Pirillo, Peter Dawson, Niall Cook and Jack Krupansky, inter alia) about the relative merits of Technorati statistics on bloggers and whether it is all just ‘allusion capital’ (which I think that is a lovely turn of phrase).
I agree that there is little semantic reflection on what the statistics mean — just because I attract X number of links on a post does not necessarily mean that the post itself holds intrinsic value. It could just as easily be a statistical anomaly brought about by a bunch of other bloggers pointing to my post as an example of a ridiculous idea or a bad example.
But if there is a continued linking to those authors, by a reasonably large body of readers, then it must show that there is something that the author does that is appealing, wouldn’t you agree?
If someone was consistently bad you wouldn’t bother giving them of oxygen of link love (aka ‘publicity’) after a while, would you? I wouldn’t have linked to any of the authors above if what I thought they had written was complete garbage and a waste of time.
If I started sprouting complete nonsense (as distinct from my usual level of it) then you wouldn’t bother reading me anymore, you’d possibly/probably unsubscribe from my feed and you wouldn’t go citing me in your own posts anymore.
So perhaps a strong Technorati ranking is, over time, an indication (and no more, I agree) of an author’s ability to ‘hit a note’ with a number of readers.
I also agree that any ranking (I’m not picking on Technorati here) on any search engine can lack semantic value for the researcher at that moment, depending on what they are searching for and why.
Technorati: semantic web, Dan Hill
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Dan Hill 02.19.06 at 6:05 am
Valid points Lee. If a blog receives a lot of links there is certainly something in it. I’m just not always happy to call it authority or popularity.
In the lower-middle ground, ranking doesn’t discern a quality blogger new to web authoring and on the way up from a truly awful blogger getting chastised with public airing.
I believe you are onto a key measuring factor in continued linking; the total links to unique linking site ratio.
Technorati doesn’t appear to take this into account.
Looking at 10th and 11th spot, despite the fact that one blog has 30793 links from 6513 different sites, this is outranked by another that has 18881 from 6519 different sites.
Accordingly, links from 6 more unique sites is more important than 12000 links.
I don’t buy that.
Andrea Weckerle 02.19.06 at 12:36 pm
Lee,
My take is that Technorati rankings are but one of several imperfect tools to measure a blog’s impact. The real question is whether a blog is being read by the right people, not necessarily by how many (although I’d argue that there is overlap). The “right people” of course differ depending on one’s goal for the blog in question. The challenge comes in when an unknown blog tries to get in front of these target audiences; a higher ranking can serve as an introduction.
Dan,
Would it be possible to open your comments feature to non-Blogger account holders? This is the comment I would have left on your blog:
You definitely point out some of the flaws in the “more links are better” debate. The Technorati system and others measure hard facts, i.e., how many links by how many different sites, but say little about the *reason* behind those links: Authority, agreement, disagreement, link baiting, etc. Perhaps, as Lee suggests, the number of links over time is a better indicator for measuring a blog’s impact. But what is a proper measure of time? And how can we compare one blog to another, given their different start dates and number of posts?