I love sliders.  See my last post, for example - it was basically about sliders. But the Technorati "authority" slider seems to imply that video blogger Andy Carvin knows more about me than I know about myself.  I just interviewed Andy this morning, so I think that if anything is true it's quite the opposite.

Really, it's hard to write anything about this "authority measuring system" without mentioning the incredible complaints being raised by people with boatloads of blogospheric authority who apparently earned it for something other than their understanding of the blogosphere (no harm in that).  Aside from that, see also Stowe Boyd's complaints that this is yet another system that fails to give him his due.  Stowe is an "Internationally recognized authority on social tools and their impact on business and society" according to his site bio - so you have to wonder when Technorati and their algorithms are going to get with it and understand that.  I will get past this point, but I'll also say that my discovery of Stowe's complaints was not made possible by inbound links, personal recommendations of anyone or serendipity.

The real deal: Technorati now offers a slider to filter your search results according to the number of inbound links the blogs appearing in the search results have.  The first priority, even with the authority slider all the way up, is time - the most recent results appear first.  Presumably a certain percentile of the blogs in your search results are just not displayed when you bump up the authority requirement. (Why no AJAX here?) You still need to go to the blog finder section if you are just plane interested in finding which blogs on a given topic have the most inbound links.  In order to show up prominently in the search results with the authority slider in any position you would have had to use the search terms in the text of a post relatively recently.
None the less, this really will be useful outside the ego-search-o-sphere and the psycho-sphere (that is the last time I talk to Andy Carvin, for example).  Last month I was researching blogs for a client to pitch their  (non profit) service to for coverage (something I'll never do again, by the way) and I would have liked to filter search results by inbound links.  Sometimes you want to search by subject heading/category/metadata (like the Blog Finder service at Technorati) and sometimes you want a full text search.  Being able to filter the results of those full text searches is good.

Problem:  You can't get RSS feeds of these searches filtered.  That's a shame.  What if I wanted to close message from blogs without a lot of inbound links in my search feeds?  I do, in fact!  Hopefully this problem will be solved soon.

I like this system, maybe just because it's a slider.  Of course I wish it was called something different.

Update:  See this post at the Blog Herald for another perspective - that blog networks have an unfair advantage in such a system because of the number of inbound  links  created by the network.  Good point!