Under The Bridge

Wow, we’re getting popular; we now have a grand total of 15 authority at Technorati! You may recall, when we got our first authority point, we jumped from blog rank 10,280,644 to 5,137,428. And how does 14 more points do us? Why, we’re all the way into the top million — w00t! — with a rank as I write of a stunning 646,322. That’s pretty good out of “over 112.8 million blogs” isn’t it now? Not that we’re going to stop nipping at the heels of the 646,321 above us, of course!

Pretty much the first thing I did after the first post on this blog yesterday was to head over to Technorati and create an account and claim it as mine, since that looked like a good place to keep tabs on whether anybody actually noticed that anything was showing up here. Immediately upon creation, it was assigned a Technorati Authority of zero and an Authority Rank of 10,280,644. 

Now, if I follow how things work over there, what those numbers mean was at the moment of creation of this blog yesterday, nobody linked to it, thus the Authority of zero; and out of the “over 112.8 million blogs” that Technorati indexes, there were only 10,280,643 that had an authority greater than zero, and the other 102 million-odd of us had absolutely no one acknowledging their existence whatsoever within the last 180 days, thus we all shared that bottom rank.

So, as we finish up day number 2 of this blog’s existence, we’ve been linked back to by one other blog which Technorati tracks: this Pink iPhone place which, I’m guessing, has some very very good spidering routines in place to catch any blog posts that come out of the blue with “iPhone” in them as soon as they’re posted. That gives us an authority of 1 now — w00t! — and a consequent jump in Authority Rank all the way to 5,137,428.

Assuming I do follow this ranking thing correctly, that means that as I write this there’s 5,137,427 blogs with more than one site recently (last 6 months) linking to them; 5,143,216 blogs that have exactly one site linking to them; and somewhere around 102 million blogs that got as far as being indexed by Technorati at some point in their existence but have been ignored by the rest of that over 112 million for at least six months.

Wow. I was vaguely aware that, like everything social preference can be applied to, blog readership followed a power law distribution, but judging by these observations, the “long tail” isn’t a tail at all, it’s a flat line. 

Or, it could just be that Sturgeon’s Law is off by 5.54%, if we define “crap” as “Authority < 2″. Whichever. Hopefully somebody else will see fit to increase our Authority at some point, and we’ll see how the percentages break down in those lofty greater-than-1 skies above us.