My Blog Ranking

Sometimes you get a particular piece of news and you just really don’t know what to think of it. That’s the dilemma I face today.

Technorati is the authority for tracking blogs on the World Wide Web. I mean the authority. Nobody tracks blogs like Technorati does.

The blog tracking business is specialized. Not just anybody can track blogs. Technorati does it by inviting bloggers all over the blogosphere to put a little snippet of code on their page. Every time the page is refreshed, a server at Technorati gets pinged and the blog is tracked. Not rocket science. But pretty cool.

Heck, when I first established my blog last year, I balanced the corner of a heavy book on the “refresh” key and left it there overnight, just to raise my blog ranking.

Well, it didn’t work. (I think they have filters for that kind of stuff, anyway.)

Anyway, I just checked my Technorati statistics. According to their web site, they track 108.5 million separate blogs. (That’s million, with an “M”. Not as impressive as a billion with a “B”. But a lotta blogs, nonetheless.) There’s a whole lotta bloggin’ goin’ on out thar!

Out of that 108.5 million, my ranking is, uhm, 1,803,855th.

That’s when the good news / bad news starts to sink in.

Let’s see. On the one hand, I’m in the 98th percentile. Gee, that’s good enough to get into just about any Ivy League school. I oughtta be proud.

My guess is that there are a whole lot of dead blogs out there. Because it looks like there are just about 100,000,000 of them that actually have lower readership than mine. And my readership is just about as low as the belly of a flat skunk on the center stripe of a country highway.

On the other hand, I have almost two million blogs that I have to leap-frog to get to that coveted number one position. (That rank is currently held by “Boing Boing” at www.boingboing.net, described as “a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies”.)

Heck, I have 800,000 blogs that I have to leap-frog to get to that coveted one million position!

I’m not going to fret too much about it. I pretty much write what’s on my mind. Some of it is actually good. And some of it can be used for bird-cage liner.

I’m going to write what I want. A few people are going to read it. I may get lucky and get a book deal some day. All I need are about a million of my friends to commit themselves to balance a heavy book on the refresh key.

I think I just saw a pig flying by my window. With a melting snowball in his mouth. Maybe there is a chance for me after all.