Scoble, Technorati and Bloglines (and Dow Jones and Nasdaq AGAIN different?! What’s going on?)

Scoble has been really picking on Technorati recently, and I can't figure out why. Given the megaphone that Robert has it has got to be really hurting Technorati. There has been a lot of detailed commentary about this, some of it quite good, for example David Berlind and Dan Farber on ZDNet and Padawan.info. My modest contribution to the debate is this: Why does it shock anyone that the number of links reported by Technorati is different than the number of citations counted by Bloglines? These are statistics for which there are no objective definitions. Both sites are measuring something but are they measuring the same thing? No! Unfortunately (sort of) neither site gives the detailed objective definition of what they are measuring. I say "sort of", because, guaranteed, those definitions would be inaccurate and dated, and no one would read them anyway. (Update : I am pretty sure that my modest contribution is not original but it what is screaming out in my mind each time I read about this topic.) (Update 2: Maybe a better analogy would be feigned surprise that Fox News poll results differ from The New York Times, or that the statistics about how many people have died from AIDS are different depending on who is reporting. I mean, this isn't the speed of light we are talking about here.) Technorati Tags: bloglines, scoble, technorati, truth