For almost as long as the Technorati Top 100; or as it is also known – The A-List, has been around and been used as a measuring stick of a blog’s popularity there has been a large portion of those self-same A-Listers who have tried to convince the rest of us that A) the A-List didn’t exist or B) if it does it isn’t that important.

Recently though this hypocrisy has become more evident with the advent of the Techmeme Leaderboard and all the press the (non)A-List bunch wrote about it. Of course this was the same bunch that occupied the Technorati Top 100 that was under fire as being dead in the water.

Then today I see via Louis Gray’s blog that TechCrunch and Gabe (Techmeme) got together and came up with yet another Top 100 using Google Reader data. Not to be out done apparently Robert Scoble also got into the number crunching and came up with his variation of the Top 100 blogs.

The end result of all this number crunching is that there is not much difference in placement between Techmeme Leaderboard, Technorati, TechCrunch/Gabe Top 100 or The Scoble Top 100. The A-List is still the A-List regardless of the methodology being used and the rest of us are still in the basement slugging away.

Louis wonders why all this effort:

But truthfully, while the A-List titans likely enjoyed putting the numbers together, it’s a mockery that they’re left doing this independently when Google obviously has enough resources to deliver the data. It comes down to either not knowing how (unlikely), not wanting to (maybe), or choosing to do something else. So what is it they’re doing?

To which I replied as a comment to his post:

This is the same bunch who say that either the A-List doesn’t exist or if does it isn’t important – what they are doing is showing how much crap their A-List denial is.
By doing this they are also showing what many of us in the lower ranks have been saying all along – ranking is important within the blogosphere especially for many of these guys because that is in part how the value their advertising rates – not to mention boost their already inflated egos.

The fact is that I and many other bloggers have been saying all along that there is nothing wrong with having a ranking system for bloggers and to deny one exists or that it is important is just a bullshit argument being used to protect ranking turf.

So the next time some A-Lister chimes into a conversation about how unimportant rankings are tell ‘em to stuff it and point them to the links in this post that shows exactly how their fellow (non)A-Lister’s do seem to think it is important.

Additionally there is an interesting comment from Ian Kallen of Technorati to a post recently written by Douglas Karr about the troubles with the Technorati service.