Yesterday I got email from LinkedIn informing me that, based on endorsements on their site, I was one of the 1% of top bloggers in the UK. My first thought, naturally, was, “that’s nice, go me!”. However, this was quickly followed by, “that’s ridiculous, how ever did they get such a daft result?”

I mean, John Scalzi is a top-rated blogger. Compared to him I’m a total nobody. My blog posts only average a couple of hundred readers. There must be lots of people in the UK with a bigger readership than me.

But this is, after all, LinkedIn we are talking about. It is supposed to be a professional networking platform. How many people on there actually list blogging as a skill? Very few, I suspect. I don’t take the site very seriously, so I’m happy to list what I actually do. I can’t see me ever being offered a job blogging in the UK. I’m old, female, trans and a science fiction reader. I’m positively drowning in cooties. (Indeed, no one is going to offer me a job doing anything in the UK, for those same reasons.)

So how did this happen? Where did these hordes of people endorsing my blogging skills come from? Well, “hordes” is a bit of a misnomer. I only have 457 connections on LinkedIn. I have no idea how I got that many, as it is the one site where I routinely turn down requests from people I don’t know. At least one of my connections is dead.

As to people who have endorsed my blogging skills, the number is 59. More interestingly, only 13 of those are based in the UK. So much for being a top British blogger, eh? I’ll try not to let it go to my head.

But I bet there are people out there who got the same email and are trumpeting their glory. Unless, of course, there are fewer than 100 people in the UK who list blogging as a skill on LinkedIn. That would not susprise me at all.