Z-lister explodes

I’ve watched viral web pieces gather steam and take off like a rocket to the moon. But I’ve never been a part of one until now. This all started with Mack Collier wanting to spread a little link love to a few blogs that he thought deserved a little more attention. A few folks added a few more links until it became a monster unto itself.

My story is an interesting case study in Technorati logic. I had been debating whether or not to move from Blogger to Wordpress. One thing that had always stopped me was the fact that I would have to lose my links and ranking. But I made the move anyway (looking back I should have done it much earlier).

When the z-list meme began, I had 2 blogs linking to me and a Technorati rank of roughly 260,000. After a week or so of the meme blowing up across the internet (including postings from marketing guru Seth Godin and Digitas Creative VP David Armano), this blog now has 67117 links and a new ranking of 49,372 25,448. Seth is even attempting to leverage the new functionality in Squidoo called Plexo for user ranking. Though is particular Plexo is turning into its own mini-Technorati, the technology is cool, if not a little slow. As of right now, Strategic Design is setting at #48 of 262.

But the best part isn’t the numbers, it’s the new blogs and people that I’ve been introduced to. As the blogosphere continues to grow, it gets harder and harder to find good content. And while I’ll probably never be a Top 100 blogger, it has been nice to let the power of the web do a little natural marketing for me.

z-list