Rank

Everyone in the military knows that “Rank has it’s privileges”. And ranking in the New York Times bestseller list or in the Forbes 500 is something that some people strive for with all their might. I’ve even had my day when rank was important such as when I won 1st place in the Utah State High School mathematics competition or when I came in first in my class at the U. S. Army Ordnance Basic Office Training School. But in my line of work there isn’t much competition and ranking, so I’d kind of forgotten that it still is very much with us.

I was reminded of it recently when I was playing around with features to add to my blog. There are web sites which track when blogs are updated so that people who care can be automatically notified. Technorati.com is one of those sites. They also read tags that you put on your posts so that people searching for particular topics can find those posts – sort of like a mini-Google oriented specifically for blogs.

But one of the other things this Technorati does is rank blogs by the number of other blogs and websites which refer to them or routinely accept feeds much like a newspaper gets information from news syndicates. I was deeply wounded to find out that my blog ranks 1,106,952nd in all the blogs tracked by this service. Does that mean there are 1,105,951 blogs that are more important and more popular than mine? Wow, talk about getting picked last on the schoolyard baseball team. That even makes my ranking as an Amazon book reviewer (23,550th) look great.

My niece Lynece also made the point recently that ranking of students for the “No Child Left Behind” program also contains idiotic standards and abuse of statistics such that a school can only be successful if every child is above average. Isn’t it silly. I mean half of all the practicing physicians in America graduated in the bottom half of their class. Remember that the next time you’re in for a check-up.

File under: Ranking