They like me. They really like me!

O-kay . . . I just received the following message posted to me from Blogger:

Our editors recently reviewed your blog and have given it an 8.2 score out of (10) in the Sports/Rugby category of Blogged.com.

This is quite an achievement!

We evaluated your blog based on the following criteria: Frequency of Updates, Relevance of Content, Site Design, and Writing Style.

After carefully reviewing each of these criteria, your site was given its 8.2 score.

Cool, thinks I.

That is -- until I visit Blogged's rugby directory.

The Red Terror blog site is rated as "Great," which puts me somewhere in the middle. "Great" is overstatement, but the middle sounds about right to me, and I can live with that.

Nevertheless, I find my blog rated higher than Mark Keohane's blog Keo, which rates only a 7.5 -- or "Very Good" -- rating, at Blogged's review.

There is no way in hell that my website, nor most of the others rated ahead of Keo, deserves the rating. That is a joke.

Keo is a truly "great" blog. They produces constant daily news and commentary, including live trackers, from a small battery of writers, and receives regular feedback comments from readers in the hundreds, and sometimes even pushes past a thousand on a single topic, when on my best day I am lucky to get five. Keohane's is a far more relevant and useful blog, and his rating seems to me an ignorant insult.

Sure, Keo often pushes buttons of hardcore Springbok fans. But it is a valuable resource, and tells me that when you make people angry (as presumably valued in the rating), then you're probably doing something right.

Moral of the message: take these blogger ratings with a large grain of Atlantic sea salt. They're bunk!