Disruptive Conversations

Hmmm.. so the "Technorati Authority Widget" I mentioned in my previous post (and described on the Technorati blog and Tools page) does NOT do what I thought it would do.  Based on this:

What's your Authority? Are you considered an authoritative blogger who's fluid prose rakes in link love by the bushel? Now you can proudly display your official Technorati Authority with our new Authority Widget.

I assumed that the widget would return your Technorati "ranking".  Instead, it returns "the number of blogs that link to you", which is an okay thing to display... but not my expectation.   It's also the opposite of the "ranking" in that you want a higher link count.

It seems to me that Technorati needs to clarify, at least for this widget, what they mean by your "official Technorati Authority" because they have two (well, really three) measures in their stats (example - stats for this blog):

1. Technorati Ranking: lower is better - ranking of your blog against all others based on some metric Technorati developed. Down side is that widget could get quite huge due to large numbers and there is also little incentive for someone who is #1,891,345 to put it on their blog.
   
2. Number of blogs that link to you: higher is better - number of blogs that have linked to your site in the last 6 months.  Appears to be a major input into "ranking" and is a good sign of potential "authority" of blog.  Widget size is probably no issue because count grows up and realistically won't get too high (top blog list currently has high of 26,866). More bloggers might use it because again it is counting up and not on such a massive scale as the "ranking".
   
3. Number of links from other blogs: higher is better - number of links to your blog from the blogs counted in #2.  Useful in that some blogs might link to you many times.  The challenge is how to interpret the number.  Knowing that a blog was linked to several times by a highly-regarded blog is useful information.  Having it linked to many times by a spam blog (or one of the author's other blogs) is not terribly useful.  This number would seem very easy to game.

Obviously they have chosen #2 for this widget... but my feedback to the Technorati folks would be to clarify in the text on their Tools page exactly what this widget is showing.