Played with Technocrati's new 'Authority' feature and thought it a good addition but a bad choice of name.
The problem is that we already kowtow too much to popularity, and make too many decisions based on what others think is good, but at least you still think you're the one making the decision.
But when you give the name "authority" to something that's essentially PageRank (how many incoming links the blog has), you're claiming that quantity translates into quality, and that we ought to give more weight to someone's opinion just because lots of other people think like him or her.
Really? OK, OK, Wisdom of Crowds and all that, but we're getting perilously close to Might Is Right here (or perhaps it's Two Wrongs DO Make a Right, and two thousand wrongs make it righter?) Perhaps they meant it to be funny, but not everyone would take it that way