Why thinking is bad for you.

So this morning's little exercise in personality disorders got me thinking - and this, my friends, is a very bad thing. (Hmm. If Martha Stewart can coin 'It's a Good Thing', I wonder if I can coin 'This, my friends, is a very bad thing.'...maybe someone has already beat me to it.)

I have been noticing of late several of the blogs which I read when I have nothing to do (read: most of the day while getting paid to sit in my office and look busy) have little cute icons either for Technorati or TTLB. For the uninitiated (which was me until about two days ago), these sites essentially keep track of who links to your blog and assign some sort of ranking based on linkage.

TTLB (The Truth Laid Bear, in case you were curious -- I was) has a little 'ecosystem' that gives you distinguishments from 'Insignificant Microbe' through 'Higher Beings', all based on the people who link to your site. Essentially based on your popularity.

Thinking on that, I recalled an article I read a few months ago on how there was now this thing that basically let you use your AOL Instant Messenger Buddy List to measure your popularity. I didn't pay attention at the time.

Now I'm just reminded of the geeky guy who works in Meg Ryan's bookstore in You've Got Mail who says when asked about online dating, "I basically see the Internet as one more way to be rejected by women." Cause gosh, if you're not popular in real life (but want to be) and you're fairly convinced that no one actually reads your blog, and you Google to see who links to your blog (thanks, Family Man, btw.) well...you could develop a pretty complex complex. So it's probably just better all the way around not to think too hard about this stuff and just realize that someone has to be the Insignificant Microbe in order for the Higher Beings to exist.