Blog rankings and all that

I don't spend too much time worrying about if anyone is reading my blog. I know for sure that Scubes reads it, god knows why.

Anyhow I'm kind of intrigued by the whole blog ranking concept. I don't really understand it.

There's some entity called technorati and they are somehow responsible for recording traffic. Or maybe that's not what they do. I don't understand it.

Then there are those counters and all that. Again I don't have one and don't know if having one would make me more or less curious about who reads this stuff.

Does anyone out there have a counter or a ranking somewhere? If so, does having it make you think differently about what you write or how you write?