Claiming a Token, or Tokening a Claim?

I've been asked to write an article for an academic audience about blogging. Usually it's the other way around: I blog here about issues in which I have academic interest, because I can be more explicitly political than I can either in the classroom or in a peer-reviewed journal.

I started researching blogging, because that's what we academic types do when it's time to write an article, and learned my blog should be listed among Technorati's 1,277,952 other blogs, to claim my space in statistical analyses of blogging or maybe drum up some more traffic, or something like that.

In order to verify that I actually exist, I have to put a particular code (sorry "claim token") in a blog post. So here you go, Technorati: 9PP5HZ4QHU9C.

Faithful readers, have you any idea what this means? I feel a bit as though I'm making a blind leap off a dock into some very muddy water of unknown temperature and filled with who knows what manner of physical obstacles or biting creatures. Who is (or are) technorati, really?