For people who watch the numbers, the past several weeks have been mixed for Orient Lodge. When Google did its big page rank realignment, Orient Lodge dropped from a page rank of 5 to a page rank of 4. Not a big change, but not a change in the direction I would have liked to have seen.

Now, my Technorati ranking has been plummeting. A few months ago, I participated in some viral cross-linking which drove my Technorati authority towards 700. Now, the virus seems to have passed and I’ve dropped below 400 in my authority and out of the Technorati top 10,000. My Alexa ranking, which is another ranking which is fairly easily gamed slipped from 142,000 during the summer, and higher before that to something over 160,000 before climbing back to 154,000. On Quantcast, I slipped from 3000 visitors a month with a ranking of 474,000 to closer to 2000 visitors a month before climbing back to 2500 visitors a month with a ranking of around 552,000. The bright spot in the numbers game was climbing from 764,000 on Compete up to 391,000 with over 3000 monthly visits. However, Compete tends to lag a little bit, so it may drop soon enough.

Yet really, it isn’t the numbers that matter. Today, I received an email from one person asking if they could use the poem I wrote about the funeral home on his website. Another person wrote to say that some of my thoughts on social networks were really helpful to a company they were working with. (Now, all that is needed is for me to start getting paid more often for my sharing my thought about digital social media).

Then, this evening I found that Benny’s World had spotlighted my blog. I learned about Benny’s World through the Edwards campaign, and have enjoyed reading it. I am honored to be spotlighted there.