Technorati

Thing 14


I'm becoming fascinated by the world of blogging. There are so many people out there doing it, and they all want somebody to read it. (If you don't, why are you blogging in the first place? That's what tiny diaries with tiny keys are for.

Once that somebody reads the blog, I think they'd probably like them to link to their blog, or favorite it, or put it on a blogroll, or all of the above. They absolutely want to know how many people are doing these aforementioned activities.


This is the part where Technorati steps in. Technorati lets you see how many times people have linked to you, what your rank is, how many fans you've got; basically it re-enrolls you in high school while you live in anxiety wondering how popular you really are. I'm afraid my Technorati experience is very similar to the life I lived in Frederick High--my ranking is 3,915,745. I was browsing around the forums dealing with links and the like, and there were a number of users worried about their status, wondering why their ranking had dropped or hadn't risen, what happened to their authority, blah blah blah.

Actually, I understand more than it sounds like. Last fall, I started a Myspace page for myself just for fun. Around the same time, several other people I knew started pages too, and, unbeknownst to them, we engaged in a deadly serious popularity war. I couldn't stop myself from looking daily to see how many "friends" they had and compare it to my own. I was experiencing a strange, leftover, high-school feeling and I wanted to make sure that I had as many friends as they did. It consumed me. Eventually, however, my slightly more mature adult side took over, and I decided to delete my profile. The Yardslippers Myspace page now fulfills my social networking needs, and I don't feel the pressure to have lots of "friends." Besides, it's the bands fault, and not my own personally, if someone has more friends than we do.


All that said, if you're feeling like you want to Favorite my blog, please feel free.