Here’s a fat tail for you – technorati tracks the ‘authority’ of blogs, which is basically measured by how many other blogs link to yours in a post. We got linked to by my friend Mike Lupica, increasing the authority of this blog from 0 to 1. Which meant that the ranking of this blog on technorati rocketed from somewhere around 4,200,000th all the way up to 2,474,868th! Which in turn means that there are around 2,000,000 blogs listed with technorati (about 44%) with no links to them at all! The blog with the highest authority is Huffington Post (24,000), the next highest are techcrunch and engadget (both about 14,000).
While this is perfectly normal behaviour for social networks (especially internet-based ones), it’s still pretty interesting to see it in action.
(Hmmm, and if Mike is listed on technorati, I just bumped his authority by a bit… not that we’re gaming the system!)
How do I link to you? Just put it on my blog?
Well, Tim, I think this way all the time. {Note: this fact in no way disproves or mitigates the statement that you’re weird}. I was thinking just the other day about how way more major league baseball players have below-average statistics (even rate ones) b/c major league baseball is the far right end of a normal distribution curve that’s been cut off, causing the observed distribution to look somewhat like a fat-tail graph (albeit not as extreme as the one you’ve got posted here).
Amber – technorati looks for links in other blog posts. So they’re not looking for blogroll links, but links in actual posts. The one thing that’s not clear to me is how widely they search, whether they only look at other blogs listed with technorati, or if they look at all the blogs they can find…
Hi Peter! You’re exactly right about pro sports. My friend Ben once ran into Marty McSorly at a skating rink and was absolutely astonished at how good a skater he was, and how skilled he was with the puck. And this is a guy that was probably in the bottom 1% of skaters in the NHL at the time.
And, glad to know I’m not alone, even if I am still weird! 😀
Very happy to set you on your way towards online dominance, Tim. The suits over at Amazon and Google are quaking in their boots, no doubt! As for how Technorati searches for links within posts, I believe it only does so with blogs that are *registered* with them. Which you and I both apparently did.
Thanks Mike! I’ve been linked to again, so I’ve rocketed up to 1.7 millionth! Last I checked though, your authority was 4, so you’re some kind of internet giant compared to me… 😀