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Stardate 20010805.2253 (On Screen): As a form of automated ego-stroking, I suppose that Blogdex could be worse. I finally decided I wanted to see if I was listed in there, and having nothing better to do and a broadband connection, I started scanning through it, and found myself in position #2777 with five links. (Sigh; I really need a hobby.) But having done that I found out that it actually is possible to search for a site by name, though they don't go out of their way to make that obvious. You use the following: http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/browseSource.asp?url=http://denbeste.nu/, only you plug in the URL you're trying to find. So, I decided I'd try out a few friends' sites and see how they rated:

Lia (Cheesedip): 3
Chris (Disenchanted): 3
Sean (Interact): 1
Cat (Frykitty): 27
Matt (A Whole Lot of Nothing): 57
Keith (keithbrown.com): 19
Fiona Elise (Keith's daughter): 16
Brian (Brian.Carnell.com): 2

And then, with great trepidation, I looked up Kottke's site: 185 links, 7th place, and the highest rated actual personal site among the tens of thousands they've catalogued. I have nothing against Jason; I don't know him but he shows no sign of being a hazard to society. He's probably a nice guy; I bet he's even been known to pet a puppy now and again. But I've looked at his site many times and I simply don't understand why it's so popular. Every site I just listed is at least as good as Jason's site and some of them are vastly better, and yet Kottke's site is linked more than all the rest of them combined. I've been trying to figure this out for a long time and I've finally come to the conclusion that it's based solely on longevity. He's heavily linked simply because he's been around a long time.

Of course, this is not a complete list of all the sites linking to these people. I, myself, have many others not listed among my measly five. Rather it's a census of links among the people who chose to add their sites to the crawler's list. I've always objected to systems where ratings are based on seniority and not on merit, and on the basis of merit, Keith's page would rate at least five times Jason's. (Jason's been reduced to the banality of posting pictures from his vacation and "Today's word from the dictionary", for crying out loud. Keith doesn't necessarily discuss profound things, but he has the gift of being a story-teller, sort of like a cut-rate Garrison Keeler.) (discuss)

Update: Sean mentions that a friend of his managed to end up high in the Blogdex "recent" list and as a result got five hundred hits. This suggests that this system is subject to abuse, since you only need five or six links to hit the top of that list. A group of people who were registered with the spider (say, 30 or so) could all add new cross-links to each other and all end up high on the daily log even if the spider didn't actually visit them all that day. People have been working to fool systems like Google and Alta Vista for years; it's only a matter of time before people begin to try to screw with Blogdex.