Another problem with the new Technorati Authority filter is that many of us are Bill Murrays caught in our own little Groundhog Day where authority is concerned.

Duncan has posted about the problem twice at The Blog Herald and I have posted about it here as well. While I am a self-appointed customer evangelist for Technorati and Dave has a perfect track record of fixing the problem when I go long, it does seem to be a recurring problem.

For whatever reason, my link numbers and those of several others get stuck. I’m stuck at 80 sites and 142 links right now and have been for a few weeks. Every time I get a new link, my oldest one falls off. I probably have between 50 and 100 links that have been temporarily lost (they come back when Dave asks Niall to reboot the list). So this means that as I get more and more links (hopefully due to all the hard work I put in writing and conversing), more and more links fall off the back end. I’m working hard every day, but my authority level stays the same because of this problem.

As I have said before, I am certain Technorati will get this issue fixed. And if I were the only one it was happening to, I wouldn’t even post about it. In fact, I feel like a whiner talking about it, but Technorati is a great service and it’s more important that we iron out the wrinkles than it is to protect my manly image. So I’ll take one for the team and whine a little.

It will be fixed. But in the meantime, it’s frustrating. Especially now that our link counts affect the way the filter treats us.

Technorati Tags:
technorati, authority

I fight authority, authority always wins
I fight authority, authority always wins
I been doing it, since I was a young kid
I’ve come out grinnin
I fight authority, authority always wins

-John Mellencamp

God willing, I’m through talking about the whole Gatekeeper thing. As John Perry Barlow wrote in the song I named my oldest daughter after, “let the words be yours, I’m done with mine.”

But at the risk of stumbling a little close to the cliff, I was interested in Steve Rubel’s post today about authority.

Steve says that the concept of links as a measure of authority turns the quest for blogging success into nothing more than a popularity contest. Sure it does, but there’s more to it than that.

He asks “does this mean Britney Spears is an authority too just because she’s popular?” Well, she’s clearly not an authority on car seats for babies, but let’s say you do a search for, I don’t know, whatever Britney is- maybe “good looking women who claim to be singers but are really only creations of the old media.” And then let’s say your search results (generally determined by links) indicate that she is the person most people link to when talking about that sort of person. Does that make her popular? Not really. Does it indicate that she might be the best example of that sort of person, certainly. So links are about more than just popularity. They are evidence of the collective determination of the linking population.

Do a Google search for “founder of RSS” and you get a link to a story about Dave Winer, certainly nobody’s Sandra Bullock.

Steve quotes the Oxford Dictionary, but I’m a working man so I’m going to quote the American Heritage Dictionary and put forth the definition that Steve omitted- the one that is the closest to the meaning of the word authority as used in this context:

“An accepted source of expert information or advice.”

There are two important words there:

accepted, which implies consensus, which is demonstrated on the blogosphere by links, perhaps partly out of necessity, but there is certainly some correlation there; and

source, which requires a least some method of quotation, again done in the blogosphere largely via links.

There’s some logic in Steve’s argument, but the fact remains that authority in the blogosphere is measured by links. Always has been, and probably always will be.

It almost makes me want to look noisily at Scoble and scream brrreeeport!

Scott Karp continues to bring it over at Publishing 2.0. Today he asks if the only people who read blogs are other bloggers, and he even has pictures.

Bloggers reading bloggers is sort of a precursor to what the internet will be like when we each have our own internet, thanks to Google. Of our course we’ll be paid by Yahoo to search it, but again I digress.

Scott also admits what a lot of us would rather keep behind the locked doors of our Web 2.0 intoxicated minds:

[A] lot of my blog reading is motivated by my will to write- sure, I read lots of interesting things on blogs that I may never write about. But it’s the writer in me that pushes me to be an avid reader.

Absolutely that is the case with me and I bet it’s the case with most other bloggers too. In fact, if you are reading this and you aren’t a blogger or related to me, please give us a shout in the Comments below.

I think that 90% of the flow (to use Dave‘s word) in the blogosphere is generated by people who either blog now or are reading blogs in contemplation of joining the nerd parade. The other 10% are developers checking up on the competition, venture capitalists looking for another online calendar to invest in and our parents.

It’s the first cousin of the question I posed the other day about Web 2.0 in general.

For me, blogging, both the writing and the reading, is mostly about the conversation. So as long as I’m talking about topics of interest with other people, whether it’s just some other nerds or the rare non-blogging reader doesn’t really matter all that much. But the bloggers reading bloggers thing certainly supports my Step No. 3, which means that even if we do make it off the B-List, we won’t get a tour bus.

That’s OK. I suspect Calacanis has already rented all those anyway.

Technorati Tags:
blogs, blogging, web 2.0