The importance of external numbers

There has been an interesting comment thread at my cross-listed site about why people might need external validation based on measurements.

Today I realized that quite a few people are visiting this blog via blogged.com. There an "editor" (or is it a 'bot?) has rated my blog as "Good" - which I always thought was a sub-standard descriptor as a school child, preferring superlatives like "Very Good" or "Excellent". I suppose "Good" beats the 0.0 posts per week measurement from Google Reader.