If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’d have heard of Technorati, the blog community site. They’ve recently revamped their stats and ranking system to factor in social factors. The net result? This blog has seen a jump in rankings, testament to the fact that social traffic strategies work.

Let’s look at the new stats panel:

Blog Authority is measured by the number of blogs that link to you, with each blog amount to a single ‘vote’ or count in the blog authority measure.

Blog Ranking, in this case a whoppling 5,196 means I am 5,195 places away from the top.

In the words of Technorati’s Dorion Carroll:

“Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.”

You can check out his post “Technorati Authority and Rank” for more information.

You may find it interesting to look at Technorati’s Top 100 blogs which includes the usual suspects like Engadget, Boing Boing, Lifehacker, Tech Crunch and Gizmodo.

Does this ranking mean anything?

It shows you how many other blogs have linked to you, and you have an idea of the strength of your community. So it’s a good measure of readership.

It’s not a good gauge of blog monetization potential however, because a highly focused blog with 100 reader/subscribers paying a premium subscription to access the content would far outearn a 100,000 unique visitor per day blog offering free content.

For newer Internet Marketers, the lesson here is to see blogging beyond its traffic generation abilities (which it’s great at), but also to fit the pieces together and generate income from your efforts.