I’ve heard about people whose small-minded partners keep track of things like who does more dishes or who remembers birthdays and anniversaries. And I’m usually sympathetic to my friends who complain that love can’t be run on a point system.

But that’s because typical relationship measures like dishwashing and date-remembering are completely subjective and impossible to track. Happily (or unhappily), Rob and I have a far more reliable way of measuring our relative standing: our Technorati rankings.

For the uninitiated, let me explain that Technorati is a blog search engine that tracks the “cosmos” of every blog to see how many people link to it — the blogosphere’s equivalent of counting how many people signed your high school yearbook. While you can use Technorati voyeuristically, to check out how many people link to any one blog or site, you can only get a ranking for weblogs that you have claimed as your own via Technorati’s claiming system.

The good thing about this system is that you don’t have to stew over how your blog ranks in relation to every other blog in the blogosphere. All you can stew about is your own ranking….relative to the ranking of people who might be checking their rankings while sitting on the sofa next to you.

That’s how it’s come to my attention that Rob has a Technorati ranking that was a mere 72,000 a month ago (meaning he has the 72,000th-most-popular blog), jumping up to about 62,000 a couple of weeks ago, and now up to about 60,000. (Just think…of all the gin joints in all the world, Mr. 62,147 had to walk into mine.)

Meanwhile, I am languishing at a pretty consistent 72,991, give or take a hundred. That’s a leap up from about 142,000 a month ago, but it hasn’t moved at all in the past couple of weeks. That’s despite a really diligent level of blogging and a fairly steady stream of traffic to my article on making blogging part of your workflow. That’s bumped me up to 33 links from 25 sources (not that impressive, I admit) relative to Rob’s 31 links from 30 sources.

Some might say that the problem is that I have fewer sources, even though I have more links. To them, let me point out that (a) I’m kicking Rob’s ass on Blogpulse, and (b) I have a whack of inbound del.icio.us links that aren’t being counted in my favour….and shouldn’t they, on some karmic if not technological level?

I recognize that others may argue that the problem is that we care (and it is we, not I….or at least it will be once the numbers turn in my favour.) So let me just cite the Seinfeld Pez Dispenser episode, which focuses on the importance of maintaining the upper hand in any relationship:

We all want the hand. Hand is tough to get. You gotta get the hand right from the opening.

Technorati, if you’re listening….I don’t care what it takes. Find some coder on her or his lunchbreak and get him to give Rob a custom ranking (that’s http://www.robcottingham.ca/roblog). It doesn’t need to be a humiliating number, just a solid margin below mine. But I need my hand back. I can’t go on blogging like this.