Well well, another "facts are bad, we want different facts" post. This is dumber than the nonsense I saw from Tina Brown yesterday, and I wasn't sure that was even possible. Shelly Powers has decided that some facts need to disappear down the memory hole:

So I’ll say this, directly and honestly, to Dave Sifry from Technorati: Dave, you are hurting us.

The Technorati Top 100 is too much like Google in that ‘noise’ becomes equated with ‘authority’. Rather than provide a method to expose new voices, your list becomes nothing more than a way for those on top to further cement their positions. More, it can be easily manipulated with just the release of a piece of software.

You have focused on comment spam and you see this as the most harm to this community, all the while providing the weapon that is truly tearing us apart. You are hurting us, Dave.

NZ Bear, you are hurting us. With your Ecosystem, you count links on the front page, which give precedence to blogroll links over links embedded within writings, and then classify people in a system equating mammals and amoeba. Your site serves as nothing more than a way for higher ranked people to feel good about themselves, and lower ranked to feel discouraged. There is no discovery inherent in your system — no way of encouraging new voices to be heard. So NZ, you are, also, hurting us.

Well gosh. We better stop measuring things - the measurements hurt. We better stop comparing things - comparisons hurt. The link counts and top 100 are what they are - deal with it and move on. Hiding those numbers won't change anything - they'll be the same whether they get published or not.

This is the kind of stupidity that argues against Advanced Placement classes, because it might damage someone's self esteem. Sheesh - you know what, if your blog isn't in the top 100, it's not a crisis. Mine isn't, and you don't see me whining about the unfairness of it all. You want to see more readers? Write compelling content. That's it! Write something people want to read. It's not as if women can't write - the book I'm reading right now is fascinating, and I note that the author is female. Not that I noticed before - I didn't actually care. What I care about is that it's well written, on a subject I'm interested in, and is teaching me something I didn't know.

This moaning into the wind about the unfairness of ranking is just idiotic. Sheesh, get over yourself already. Oh heck, I nearly forgot - she's claiming that the rankings are doing more damage than Comment Spam? Oh? I spend zero time fighting rankings in my blog server, but I have spent a fair bit of time on comment spam. On that basis alone, she has no clue what she's talking about. If she gets her way, maybe I'll start sending her my comment and email spam - after all, it's no trouble at all in her bizarro universe.