Hey! I'm in the Technorati Top 100 (thousand)!

Dave Sifry released more info on the State of the Blogosphere...the most fascinating thing is the Magic Middle where so much of us happen to be!

No more Long Tail! I'm in the Top 100,000 (personal blog: 53,011. This blog: 64,299 the personal blog seems to have lost some links somewhere along the line. very strange.)

Measuring the Magic Middle, though, highlights (as Dave notes) the social as well as information dissemination aspect of most blogs. It's never really an either/or situation.

Post Secret's "Zero to Hero" status is also very interesting to note. A blog that has no tech information and no political spewage--but does show people expressing their innermost thoughts in incredibly creative ways--did seem like a goofus idea. But I think there is, in many ways, a need for us (people) to tell someone our deepest, darkest secrets without revealing who we might be. This was, at one time, the appeal of the confessional. That we (people) are making these statements in tiny works of art--of personal expression--makes Post Secret a public art project. Along with the desire to expose a secret is also the desire to embellish, display, create a medium or surrounding for it.

There is something ultra-human about Post Secret-- more human than the majority of breast-beating blogs out there. And after reading so many of the posts, I can't imagine how any reader couldn't find a sliver of him/herself somewhere in all those thoughts.

I continue to be impressed with Post Secret--moreso than I could ever be with HufPo. (being a celebrity, calling on celebrities to blog for you, sending out press releases, and then never reciprocating links from thousands of "little people" kinda makes for some "ringer" status in the stats.)

But back to The State....actually, now that I'm part of the Magic Middle, I feel somewhat like I rose in social status, as superficial as it might seem. Still, it's kind of fun, and I'm not sure this 'bump' could have been predicted by anyone. (I'm not concerned about its long-term impact on me. there's more to life than my blogs ranks)

That's the thing with the blogosphere...no matter how many folks try to control it, channel it, or predict it, the vagaries of human nature and the desire to communicate with others are wild cards. All we can really do is sit back, watch, and wait.

Yet we still have the problem of information overload (something I mentioned in my response to Craig's later comment on the "Che and Fidel" post.) Technorati's whipped up a new feature that allows us to filter by authority. Features, though, are as good as the algorithms that power them as much as they are by the people who decide to use them. Over time, different people are going to use different filtering applications--who know if one will dominate or not. Overall, my sense about how some of us get linked (not all--look at the Chinese/Japanese kids) will depend on how much "authority" our voice has out of the blogosphere as much as it will with how much real-world networking and blog-promoting we do. In a world where report-talk is of slightly more value than rapport-talk, creative, emotive expression might never outweigh how much and what kind of information one disseminates.

Then again, the Asian kids *could* end up taking over the world thru manic social networking. Will the Technorati 100 one day be filled with LiveJournal and MySpace blogs? Now, that's a trend I'm very interested in watching unfold.

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