Technorati specializes in the inscrutable business of ranking over a million blogs according to their “authority,” their impact on the blogosphere.
For a long time File 770‘s ranking has been pinned in the 15000 range. Compare that, if you will, to Scalzi’s Whatever. Today it ranks 2187 — but it has been as high as 130.
Ranking 15,000th means showing on the list between such internet luminaries as Slot Car News and Budget Travel Phillipines. No reflected glory there, unlike the day Whatever’s ranking of 401 threw it into a tie with Roger Ebert’s blog.
But for the first few weeks of October, File 770 embarked on a giddy ascent of Technorati’s list that seems to have been directly linked to the worldwide publicity for and immediate popularity of Ben Affleck’s movie Argo.
It’s not like I wrote that much about Argo, or more than the average number of people read those posts, or linked to them. However, I noticed that for many days Technorati had seemingly locked on one of my Argo posts as being File 770’s most recent, though in reality it had that status for a day at most. And while that post was locked on, here’s what was happening to my ranking —
October 9, 2012
Rating of 124
Ranking of 9922
October 10, 2012
Rating of 124
Ranking of 9003
October 16, 2012
Rating of 132
Ranking of 8033
October 17, 2012
Rating of 131
Ranking of 7623
October 18, 2012
Rating of 131
Ranking of 6891
October 19, 2012
Rating of 131
Ranking of 5996
October 24, 2012
Rating of 138
Ranking of 5632
(Between Steve Sailer Sucks and BTB Fitness.)
Then overnight on October 25, File 770 plunged back down the charts to 16413, just one notch above the Ashley Tisdale Fan Site. Apparently the market for Argo-inspired posts had crashed.
One other peculiarity is that along the way, in addition to my subsidiary rankings for Entertainment (2155), Comics (485), Books (1258) and Science (1837) the system gratuitously added “Politics,” for which I ranked surprisingly well (7977) considering my studious effort to avoid ever touching on the subject.
Nor can I explain why File 770 ranks better among comics blogs than books – all the credit probably belongs to James Bacon for pointing me at his Forbidden Planet blog.
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The Blogosphere makes no sense at all — a minor perturbation in the sphere leads to bigger anomalies leads to being The blog everyone reads for a month. Then it evaporates. Remember Michael Moore’s website? Who reads it now? To tell the truth, now that I know Slot Car News exists, I may have to visit — I’m a lot more interested in slot cars than yet another blog by some SF writer with something to say.