for those who don't know, there's a site called technorati.com that tracks linkage on the web. by updating itself every few minutes or so, it does a good job of tracking bloggers, what they're blogging about as seen through the links they include in their posts. of course it's not 100% accurate because bushels of blogs are published every minute with no links at all.

but still, for people in the publishing business who want to track the hot books: who's reading and then blogging about what, the site is a decent weathervane. (in the BOOKS department, the site will only track links to amazon.com...something of nuisance, but whatever.)

soOooo, i've been looking at technorati for the last six months or so, waiting, waiting, wondering, waiting, dreaming, waiting ever so patiently, for BE to appear. and then, today, lo and behold...

beneath the new thomas freidman (see, no link to thomas freidman's book, so that book won't be counted on this blog by the technorati spiders), under the new harry potter, way down below the new nick hornby and old mitch albom (who, i recently learned, went to the same day camp as me), looming right after the ever-popular blogger book: the tipping point...(drumroll)...well, there you would have found behind everyman today. just *above* freakonomics (a fantastic book i can't recommend enough, hence the link).

seeing as only 30 books make the list, and seeing as every other book on the list is a best-seller or a book with a monster marketing campaign (or both, for one usually begets the other), i'm feeling pretty self-congratulatory tonight.

if you want to scroll through 'em all, you can check out the jpeg i saved of the webpage (as proof, 'cause lord knows if we'll ever make it again) by clicking here.