So...you've been talking about WoW for the past month, and you dropped to the 104th blog of the approximately 20 million blogs on the internet, and this is supposed to be evidence that the list is reflective of which sites have interesting content? And you honestly believe this?

No, the list is reflective of how many people link to a given blog. The more links a blog receives, the more interesting it must seem.

This doesn't reflect a recent drop-off in interesting content on your blog - it reflects a change in the way that Technorati calculates your ranking. It used to be that it based the ranking on your overall number of incoming links, which created a strong bias in favour of blogs that had been around for a long while and had accumulated links over a few years. Now it only measures incoming links in the previous six months, which has the advantage of encouraging churn and ferment, but which boots some previously dominant blogs like yours (or ours) from the top 100 list.

#120 as of now. You're dropping rapidly, Joi. I'm actually getting closer to your ranking and soon I will have overtaken you *evil laugh*.

Ok, going to take my meds now.

Yeah, I think the shorter window of links counted does allow newer blogs to gain rank faster. I think this is a good thing.

"Haw haw" --Nelson Muntz

I wouldn't read too much into it. My rank and numbers of links remain unchanged, despite new links every day. Technorati's ranking system is seriously askew.

While the equation of "post content that many people will find interesting" = "many inbound links for TR to track" is right, of course by no means "interesting" = "links".

For example, I do not read, or link to, a single one of the blogs listed in that top ten since not a single one is of any interest to me. Conversely, I read and revist many other sites on a daily basis, but I do not link to them either. etc etc. There are many combinations and of course, one can only measure what another makes public. :)

In Joi's very special case, he has an enormous, TR connected and very "linking active" readership, all factors which combine to very directly relate both the quality and quantity (more the latter I believe) of Joi's weblog posting to his TR ranking. Of course I think he knows this and he is only self teasingly hinting at "I'm becoming boring" rather than just the boring "sorry I've been quiet".

Yaaawn. ;)

Perhaps you should have kept using AutoBlogger to maintain your ranking? ;)

It is rather odd the back-and-forth tides that come with the blog ranking world, huh?

Great seeing you in Palo Alto, btw. :)

Interesting post != post that will interest the greater number of people.

Am I wrong saying this?

I'm not sure that your rank is falling because your posts aren't interesting, but rather, they are not centered around as interesting of topic. I, for one, never visit your site to see what you personally have written, so much as I do to see the much more informed view points of others who read your blog. Your (very important) role as a celeb is not to "present a valid opinion" so much as it is to "present a good topic for discussion"

With absolutely nothing to back me up, I would guess that the reason your rank has dropped has less to do with a lack of interesting "posts", as it does to do with a lack of interesting "topics". You could simply copy paste a controversial headline from a newspaper each day and your rank would go right back up.

I've been experiencing the same Jon, er, Joi. But I think it's just inevitable for a 'personal' blog like ours when our minds are 'elsewhere' ;-). It's unfair to compare blogs such as ours with Boing Boing though which is a 'scavenging horde' blog, meaning several people scavenge material from interesting yet off mainstream sources with little or no personal angle.

Actually, to someone's comment above, my understanding is that Technorati only scrapes links from the home or index page of a blog, hence greatly favoring blogrolls or permanent links over those that are more ephemeral and end up dropping off. At the same time T'rati ignores certain kinds of blog rolls, like those generated by Bloglines, so it is a completely inconsistent tool.

I got this from Mary Hodder's very interesting writings on the subject BTW. One example is here:
http://napsterization.org/stories/archives/000510.html

Additionally, I have been subscribed to this blog for a long time...probably a year, and in all that time would never have called this a highly active, timely blog. No offense intended, but compared to most of the other highly ranked blogs, quality of writing aside, your blog is far less active. So, frankly, it's taken a very long time indeed for you to "drop" (and not very far at that. (And quality of writing often isn't a factor, IMHO.)

One thing that I do believe is important is for a personal blog to be personal. There is no use mixing it with the non-personal "scavenging horde" format by having more than one personality blogging. It puts the website between two horses, neither having the strength of the horde or the interestingness of the individual. On the topics versus posts point, I disagree with the previous commenter. I come to this site for your sometimes very interesting posts and then look in the comments for a community reaction.

Buyo, I agree with your disagreement which is really an exception to my post. Posts, personal or not, can become a focal point for discussions via comments and trackbacks. BTW, my name is Don Park.

Technorati refreshes the ranking number once a week, which explains why the number of sites linking to your blog seems stale.