Technorati only counts the total number of blogs which link to another blog for the Authority number, not the total number of links - which is good, since various blog features like categorization pages, preview snippets, and other pagination and navigation schemes common to blogs can cause a link from a single posting to reappear multiple times from a blog’s site.

The “Technorati Authority” label is appropriate, because in the blogosphere, the blogs which have the most citations by other bloggers are likely the most “authoritative” or most-popular. It’s a unique, blogocentric rating system, very similar to Google’s PageRank concept.

Blogs which have the highest Authority numbers are ranked highest. The Technorati Top 100 page lists the most-popular blogs.

These are the top 10 blogs they list currently:

Engadget

Boing Boing

Gizmodo, the Gadget Guide

Techcrunch

The Huffington Post Breaking News & Opinion

Lifehacker, The Productivity and Software Guide

Ars Technica

PostSecret

Daily Kos: State of the Nation

Michelle Malkin

I should note that Technorati does not count links that are tagged with the NOFOLLOW attribute, nor do they count the links found in comments, nor links generated from Trackback comment (I’ve previously advised against use of Trackback Submitter for the use of deploying spamlinks, though I think restrained use of it to hook up related articles is not a bad thing).

If you’ve got a blog, you should register it with Technorati, since it’s one of the many ways that people can search and find blog postings about subjects they’re interested in. Also, it’s pretty cool for quickly seeing how many people are linking to you or commenting about your postings.