As we've always maintained, Web ranking systems are more a matter of faith than reason.

Here's the latest:

1. Media Orchard's Google PageRank, after a year at 5, finally moved up to 6. Then it went back to PageRank 5 a couple of hours later. Error? Omen? Who knows?

2. Our Technorati rank, after peaking at 2,800, has been hovering in the low 4000s for a few months now.

3. Our Alexa ranking, after peaking at 47,000, dropped to 78,000 in a matter of weeks.

4. All the while, our traffic has trended upward, not downward, as have our subscribers.

The funniest thing is the Alexa drop. Might have something to do with the fact that Cathy and I stopped using the Alexa toolbar -- which kept crashing our IE. We figured that this move would affect the Alexa ranking, but had no idea how much. Talk about sample-size issues.

Anyhoo...screw it.