Many Bloggers have a love-hate relationship with PageRank. From technical and academic aspect, i think the idea behind PageRank is pure brilliance! It is the random probability of a surfer visiting a web page. Since the advent of Internet, many people were trying to sort and provide a meaningful listing of web pages besides just bookmarking and creating favourites list. Then came indexes and directories. Yahoo is the most famous of them all.
For many years since the inception of google, researchers and scentists have been looking for ways to rank the importance of a web page. Google adopted a ranking system and filled the gap at the time when other search engines faltered. When you key in a search, established web sites appears on top of the list instead of pages which merely contain the keywords. This is the magic of PageRank- it enables accurate and relevant searches. With that, it also changes the whole online advertising landscape.
PageRank is a good system but like any system it has to improve with time. We, on the other hand, should not lose our unique characteristics and value-addedness in pursue of high PageRank. Maintain an interesting blog or site, be friendly and i believe PageRank will follow.
Just think of PageRank as a tool to improve Internet search rather than just a ranking ladder in which we must climb.

Ah MT… very great post here! I love your sentence: PR is a tool to improve internet search and not just a ranking ladder we must climb!!
Sometimes PR things can make bloggers feel terrible.. LOL
I wish I felt the same way. Pagerank is not working right. There are new blogs with 2o posts and only 150 incoming links sporting a PR5.
After all the hard work I have done on my blog…doing everything right…Google stripped me down to a PR0.
That is simply unacceptable. My friend the Brown Baron who easily deserves a PR6 or higher is a PR0.
If you get stripped down to a PRo you may feel differently about it. The truth is that PR is completely unreliable.
Three times in a row, Google gave me a PR4. Within weeks of getting it…it was dropped to a zero and I have NEVER written a single paid post and have no paid links!!!! Explain that:)