Navel-gaze with me for a moment.

I checked my Technorati rating yesterday and noticed that I’m above the 100 authority level for the first time (111, exactly half that of my hero Patrick Lagacé). That level, according to this hyper-scientific calculation system, makes me a B-list blogebrity.

That sounds cool and all, but I’m still ranked 58,325, and I don’t think B-list celebrities have 58,325 people more important than them.

What gets me more is the words used to describe this blog in the local blogosphere, where I imagine the name carries a bit more weight because I focus on local issues. Small things like saying “un site plus connu” or “un influent blogueur” boost my ego enough to almost forget about the fact that I’m not paid a penny to do this (yet).

Of course, quite a bit of my Technorati rating comes from automated spam blogs that link to whichever of my posts contain their magic keyword, hoping for trackbacks that’ll send eyeballs to their ad-ridden sites.

Going through my logs, it seems apparent that I have some regular readers. About 50 or so subscribe to the blog’s RSS feed through Google Reader, Netvibes, Bloglines or other similar services, and more visit the site the old-fashioned way, through bookmarks, memorizing the URL or Googling “fagstein”. Many others get here through search engine searches for things that nobody else has written about. The rest are Google’s indexing bot.

So to you human readers I say thank you for reading. If I can’t have modest riches, at least I can have modest fame.

I expect the red carpet treatment at Yulblog this week. (Even though I’ll probably be at Pecha Kucha instead)

Now back to your regularly-scheduled blogging. (This week’s geography trivia question is still open, with an added hint.)