The perception of someone is an amazing thing in our culture. People perceive others in very special ways because of how they represent themselves. This is also true for bloggers, and if you want to be the big shot blogger, you have to walk the walk. The authoritative blogger asserts himself or herself as thus.

I believe a blogging authority is an author that people will look to for advice, commentary, and information on any particular subject discussed by the author. This person should also earn the respect of a majority of his or her readers, even if they do not particularly agree on a particular issue. However, all people have the potential to become an authority.

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So I'm just like the rest of you. I treat PageRank updates like a sporting event. I also monitor things like the Dirt 100 which uses an algorithm to rank the top 100 Celebrity blogs (aside from a few major anamolies, it does a good job).

The one thing that kept sticking out to me is how PopCrunch was sitting below other sites with far less traffic. Perhaps the most glaring issue was the low Technorati score that PopCrunch was assigned.

So I went over to the EatonWeb Celebrity category rankings to see if PopCrunch was getting a bad score there as well. Indeed it was.

At EatonWeb, I have database access, so I logged into see what was depressing the score. Turns out that the Technorati API was returning a big fat 0 for both total links and total blogs. Ouch. I knew that this was wrong.

Then I went over to Technorati and saw that the PopCrunch Authority score was something ridiculously low like 88. Crazy. Didn't make sense.

So then I started contacting Technorati support. The same guy probably got all five of my requests;-)

I never got a response. But within 24 hours, PopCrunch was showing a more appropriate Authority score of 617 and had found its way into the Top 5K. Further, the total links and total blogs number started returning some accurate figures.

I have no idea what was wrong. But the take home lesson is this: BlogJuice, EatonWeb, SEOMoz Page Strength and a whole slew of ranking tools (probably even GOOG itself) use Technorati data to evaluate the strength and authority of websites. And the temptation is to assume that a massive company like Technorati gets everything right.

Well that's wrong. Today I found out that Technorati wasn't tracking or storing data properly for at least one blog. I wonder how many others are out there with the same problem. You'll only know if you look;-)