Authorati should get Cartman from South Park as a mascot. (click the photo to see a short video of Cartman with “authoratah”).

Okay, all jokes aside – let’s talk about what Authorati really is and why you should care..

What Authorati is.

Authorati
There are millions of blogs on the internet. Authorati assigns a portable ratings and authority system to the blogs and online articles enabling bloggers and authors to gain reputation and increase the visibility of their publishing.

With the growing popularity of folksonomy and tagging, a large number of blogs are tagged with keywords. Authorati assigns authority to these tags and helps readers a

Why You Should Care.

You mean besides the fact that I specifically Told you to care?

If you’re like me and you would like a lazy way to know which expert to listen to, a ranking system of content helps. You can currently rate the quality of a post, how close to the proposed topic it was (gleaned from tags, it looks like), and how much of an authority you think the author is.

I’ve always believed that the blogosphere and the web at large should be sorted not by popularity, but by quality, mostly because I’m a vain elitist dillhole. But also because I want to find all the people smarter than me, and surround myself with them, so I can then also be smarter.

That’s like, maybe 6 billion people, give or take a bill-i. So you can see why I need all the help…

Of course, the problem will come in if people start to turn an Authorati rating into a popularity contest. I think it would be cool if there was some kind of algorithm applied to it, kind of similiar to the idea behind Google page rank. In Google page rank, there’s a balance between the raw number of people who are linking to you, authority links, etc.

I also think it would be killer if someone who earned a certain level of respect within the Authorati system could have more voting power on links in their same area of expertise. Would that lead to vote-hoarding or to an increase in peer respect?

Dunno… but it would be better than just raw voting… because if someone is popular, but not actually an expert at what they’re writing about, I can imagine a world where a publisher gave away something of value to get people to rate them highly.

They do have two ratings though, one is authorship and the other is authority. And the fact that this even exists is totally a start. I’d love to see it integrated in Ezine Articles – wouldn’t it be neat if a vote on an article there could somehow be imported into Authorati?

Ok, before I go on too far of a tangent, maybe you’d like to see it in action?

You can try this out below by using the FeedFlare link that says “Rate me on Authorati”. (If you want this on your blog, you can get it from Feedburner, which Authorati talks about on their blog.

*edit. Much better Cartman clip, twice as long and ends in cartoon violence. What can I say, I’m a sick woman.