One strategy (intentional or not) that I've noticed coming out of established and powerful blogs is to speak dismissively and/or condescendingly about posts on lesser blogs.

Take this recent post from The Truth About Cars where the author takes a two pronged approach.

1. He ridicules the content of the post without directly criticizing it, implying that it is riddled with fallacies, and...
2. He flatters his readership by effectively saying "but I don't need to point out the problems, because even you can..."

Now, I'm not advocating this strategy, but I did want to point out that it is effective on a psychological level. It's the "king of the hill" approach - you stay at the top of the hill by knocking your oncoming competitors down the hill. It works on your readers because it re-affirms what they already believe in their minds: that you are smarter than the other guys.

But notice how little work it takes.

As an authority, you don't really have to offer reasoned criticism. You leave that to your readers. And by passing the buck to your readers, you establish several things. First, you establish tribalistic triumphalism - even the lowest of us (not the leader, but even the readers) are smarter than the other guy's leader. Second, you establish superiority as a leader by not dignifying your competitor with a reasoned response. Third, you establish trust with your readers by entrusting them with the glorious task of defeating your competitor.

So let me ask: do you think this is a good strategy or could it backfire?

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;-)