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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