As of last week, we stabilized two aspects of the Power 150 that caused some blogs to randomly slip in rank.

As complex a network the internet may be, the entire thing revolves around two simple premises: sending and receiving. Without either, you wouldn't be able to download an image, request a web page, or e-mail a picture of your latest tattoo to your grandparents.

The same is very much true for the Power 150. Each metric in our scale requires us sending a request to it for more information regarding your blog, and receiving a response in return.

As you can imagine, there are several points in this chain that are prone to instability. For example, sometimes what we receive in response is not something we'd expect. (Especially in cases like when the Yahoo! metric broke over a month, what we receive in response is less like a ranking and more like an ugly HTML page from 1998.)

In other cases -- and this has historically been more random -- what we receive in response cannot be properly scaled. In the past, this has meant your score might randomly drop forty points on a particular day because your Technorati score suddenly became a 1.

These wrongs generally right themselves by the next day -- or, if you ask nicely, we can attempt to fix on the same day -- but we've stabilized the system such that these random slips will be reduced considerably. We've improved our fail-safes, which should be better at ignoring bad scores when we receive them. You're still vulnerable to the actual metrics dropping your score -- Technorati may think something totally different about you today than it did yesterday -- but we have little control over what other people think.