1. Barack Obama: 11,007
2. Taylor Swift: 9,507
3. CNN Breaking: 8,777
4. The Ellen Show: 8,057
5. Shit My Dad Says: 7,954
6. Lady Gaga: 7,695
7. Mashable: 7,665
8. Demi Lovato: 7,477
9. Ashton Kutcher: 7,176
10. John Mayer: 7,150
11. Britney Spears: 7,068
12. Katy Perry: 6,835
13. Selena Gomez: 6,573
14. Google: 6,124
15. Stephen Fry, 6,118
16. Oprah: 5,715
17. Twitter: 5,650
18. The New York Times: 5,210
19. The Onion: 5,160
20. Perez Hilton: 5,049
21. Shaq: 5,000

And now that the big guys in the Gang are being injected with capital, hiring tens of employees and expanding their businesses, they suddenly have a lot more to lose. Linking is never done just because. Rather, links are your political capital that must be expended appropriately. Don't link at the right time and in two weeks when you're pushing your own headline, you'll wish you had. When you stop seeing other blogs as people you admire and want to discuss things with, and start to see them as your competitor, your brain shifts and you stop linking the way you had previously.

What I'd like to see, and even be a part of, is the blogger equivalent to the 1992 U.S. Mens Basketball Dream Team. That team could take CNET apart in a year, hire the best of the survivors there, and then move on to bigger prey.

Just the thought of being a part of something like that has held us back from raising any outside capital at all. I believe we have the beginning of a team that can play a role in this new Dream Team.

So think twice before taking that venture money, guys. You may be shutting more doors of opportunity than you realize.

Bloglines complies the top 1000 list by looking at the number of "active" subscribers for a particular feed. Bloglines told us that they know people may try to game the system, so they have decided not to detail exactly how the list is computed and ranked. You can also see that Bloglines has added a graph showing subscriber trends, a top movers chart and "New to Bloglines Top 1000."

1. Instapundit
2. Don Surber
3. Science & Politics
4. Watcher of Weasesls
5. Michelle Malkin
6. National Journal's Blogometer
7. The Modulator
8. BloggersBlog.com
9. Boing Boing
10. Atrios
11. A Blog for All
12. Gothamist
13. mparent777
14. TFS Magnum
15. Alliance of Free Blogs
16. anglican.tk
17. Micropersuasion
18. Pajamas Media
19. BlogHer
20. The Jawa Report
21. Reddit
22. Soccer Dad
23. Nose on Your Face
24. aHistorically
25. The Anchoress
26. AmericaBlog
27. SFist
28. TBogg
29. HorsePigCow
30. Why Homeschool
31. The Daou Report
32. Sisu
33. MetaFilter
34. Megite
35. LAist
36. Captain's Quarters
37. Shakesville
38. Guy Kawasaki
39. Lucy by Lucy
40. Blue Star Chronicle
41. Official Google Blog
42. The Glittering Eye
43. asterisco.paradigma.pt
44. Read/WriteWeb
45. Hullabaloo
46. The Conservative Cat
47. Phillyist
48. The Social Customer Manifesto
49. The Next Net
50. Gateway Pundit
51. Crooks and Liars
52. Right Wing News
53. 10,000 Birds
54. O'Reilly Radar
55. Cowboy Blog
56. Business Opportunities Weblog
57. DCist
58. Creating Passionate Users
59. Citizens For Legitimate Government
60. What About Clients?
61. Rough Type
62. The Unofficial Apple Weblog
63. Dans la cuisine d'Audinette
64. The London Fog
65. Bostonist
66. Seattlest
67. Austinist
68. Indian Writing
69. Power Line
70. Firedoglake
71. Blog d'Elisson
72. Rhymes With Right
73. Written World
74. The Jeff Pulver Blog
75. blog d'eMeRY
76. Hugh MacLeod's gapingvoid
77. Catymology
78. Hugh Hewitt
79. Lifehacker
80. jordoncooper.com
81. Econbrowser
82. A Socialite's Life
83. Gates of Vienna
84. NevilleHobson.com
85. Waxy.org
86. A Life Restarted
87. The Volokh Conspiracy
88. See Also...
89. Dr. Sanity
90. Mudville Gazette
91. www.saysuncle.com
92. Privacy Digest
93. Londonist
94. Shanghaiist
95. Catholic and Enjoying It
96. Single Serve Coffee
97. Jeremy Zawodny's blog
98. ScienceBlogs
99. Basic Thinking Blog
100. Scobleizer

A source's presence is the probability that a random Techmeme headline at a random time over the past month was published by that source. The Leaderboard ranks sources by presence. What is a source? Sidestepping knotty issues of ownership and affiliation, sources are simply identified by the branding a publisher chooses. So blogs are generally distinct sources from their parent site. Thus, Saul Hansell writes for two different sources: Bits (the NYT blog), and the New York Times proper, even though the New York Times Company publishes both. The same goes for CrunchGear and TechCrunch and other blogs contained in blog "networks".

Sources are ranked by Presence, the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period. "Discussion" links are not taken in to consideration here - only full headlines are counted.

At a "global summit" of its most-valued software developers, Microsoft repeatedly declared that it would "win" in search and other parts of its Windows Live internet strategy.

"The words are empty," Scoble responded. "Microsoft’s internet execution sucks (on the whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that's 'in it to win', then I don't get it."

He continued: "Microsoft isn't going away. Don't get me wrong. They have record profits, record sales, all that. But on the inter-net? Come on.

"Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative."

Scoble's comments reflect wider concerns - shared by some Microsoft insiders - that the poorly understood Windows Live initiative is failing to make the impact expected when it was unveiled 18 months ago.

The survey is conducted quarterly, and the previous quarter marked the first time that Facebook was tops among both women and men.

Two blogs were in the female top 10 list for the first time: Pink Is the New Blog and What Would Tyler Durden Do? (WWTDD). Both blogs have an entertainment/gossip focus, which Mr. Weil says "is consistent with Gen Y females' current adoration with content surrounding celebrities and their 'uh oh' moments."

MySpace was second on the top 10 list for females, but it remained sixth for males, with the percentage of 17-to-25-year-old males listing it as their favorite moving up slightly from 13% in the previous quarterly listing to 14%.

As TechCrunch traffic continues to grow, a problem is popping up more and more often - the traffic we send to a site when we write about it on its launch day can (and often does) take it down. It's not that TechCrunch traffic is that massive, but it's enough that if there's a bug somewhere in application that wasn’t noticed with small traffic testing, it can be exploited and quickly take the site down. The last week, we’ve averaged one site down per day.

Examples: We wrote about Spotplex and it went down fast, as did Amie Street and Kegulator tonight (Kegulator is more of a toy, so it doesn't really count).

Another problem is that the traffic doesn't last. See this Alexa chart for Spotplex as an example. There's a spike, and then most of the people never come back. Hopefully a few stick around, register and tell their friends, but building an application to scale to handle a TechCrunch post is a long term solution to a short term problem.

1. Boing Boing
2. Engadget
3. Post Secret
4. Daily Kos
5. Huffington Post
6. Gizmodo
7. Instapundit
8. Michelle Malkin
9. Crooks and Liars
10. Dooce

1. Engadget
2. Boing Boing
3. Gizmodo
4. TechCrunch
5. Huffington Post
6. DailyKos
7. Lifehacker
8. PostSecret
9. Ars Technica
10. yanxi.bokewu.com

The cable news network plans to host more than two dozen bloggers from across the political spectrum - including sites like RedState and Daily Kos - at a Washington Internet lounge where they can monitor the election returns on a slew of flat-screen televisions. (Each blogger will get his or her own monitor, which can be tuned to any channel.) There will be free wireless access — and plenty of food and beverages, natch.

CNN Internet reporters Jacki Schechner and Abbi Tatton have been assigned to cover the gathering and provide regular updates on the air about the topics that are generating the most chatter.

"Bloggers are leading the conversation," said David Bohrman, CNN's Washington bureau chief. "You could argue that most of the political dialogue in this country is happening online, so if you don't incorporate that into your coverage, you're missing a major element."

Subscribers to CNN Pipeline, the network's broadband service, will be able to monitor the happenings at the blog party through one of the online channels, which will be dedicated exclusively to footage from the event.

Seriously, you don't ask newspaper columnists to sit in front of a laptop and write their columns on air, and we're way past the point that bloggers should have to humiliate themselves like that in order to get a few seconds of airtime. This isn't 2002, we all know what blogs are. If bloggers have something to contribute to the conversation, let them sit at a roundtable on election eve and contribute their thoughts like any other opinion writer, without treating them like teenagers at a TV dance party circa 1962 who need to be lured into the studio with "plenty of food and beverages, natch."

70% of the UK50 post daily.

66% have written about a local company.

44% have discussed multinational companies.

22% cover news a politics.

12% write about global issues.

14% write about local issues.

We worked with Technorati to compile the list of the 100 most influential blogs in the US, France, Germany and Italy, based on number of inbound links. We also manually compiled a list of the 50 most influential bloggers in the UK (promise to get this to 100). In this first study, we've begun with the Top 100 because there are lessons to learn from them. They're not all a company needs to know about the blogosphere, they are just a start. After all, they're the top blogs because so many lateral conversations are sparked by what they say. This list omits any mainstream media blogs. We were able to classify these blogs as to area of interest (technology/politics/cooking), how often they post, the extent to which they cover business and specific corporations. Our most important finding is that bloggers generally do cover business and specific product categories but they generally do not report on nor quote representatives from specific companies. We also discovered that bloggers in the US and France tend to link to each other, while in Germany and Italy the bloggers tend to link to mainstream media. We learned that the top subject areas in the US are technology and politics, while in France, the UK, Italy and Germany there are more political personal blogs.

In other words, the numbers in the green box reflect activity in the last 180 days, while the number of links directly below the green box is the total for as long as we have data.

The 180-day window means that ranks and link counts go up and down. Some bloggers see their counts rise steadily when others link to their blog. In the chart below, we see 200 days of linking to www.perezhilton.com. For purposes of ranking and comparison, we count only those links in the last 180 days (those in the red box.) Perez' counts are going up. Yay!

1. Fans: Internet readers are fickle. If they get used to reading you and then all of sudden you disappear, there are plenty of other equally entertaining blogs and columns online that they will migrate to, soon forgetting about the enjoyment you used to give...
2. Income: ...and once the fans are gone, don't expect advertising revenue to get any higher. If you're paying the bills with Google Ads, you'd better keep posting.

The company seeks to define who is shaping specific conversations in blogs with "algorithms" that analyze relationships, based on four criteria:

overall traffic and number of inbound links

contextual relevance to a customer's specified area of concern, such as key words.

frequency of content publication on such topics

the traffic it sends back to the marketer

This is a very difficult thing to do through automation, because links can often be deceptive. As the hundreds of PhDs at Google have found, it is not easy to deconstruct the masses of "link-farms" between Web sites, purposefully created to boost each other's traffic. We seem to always be one step behind the latest statistics tricks, on traffic numbers too. Rob Crumpler, the company’s chief executive officer, tells us the company has done a lot of work to combat this sort of thing.

Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it. One popular technique for building readership is to send e-mail to more well-trafficked blogs offering to exchange links with them. One popular response from those blogs is to laugh derisively and hit the Delete button.

Another approach for advertising your blog is to mention it as much as possible in conversation; you'd be surprised how many people are fascinated to hear you have a blog and want to know more, especially if you were expecting the number to be greater than zero.

However, there are many popular blogs already in existence, and if you want people to think you're cool, you're probably better off claiming you were a "guest blogger" for one of them. Your average blog has so many guest bloggers and such a crappy search feature that nobody will ever be able to prove you wrong.

Boing Boing: Crocheted replica of subway map cracks DRM on collection of old video games.

Gawker: Paris Hilton does pretty much anything.

Engadget: Samsung releases new cell phone/mp3 player/camera/web browser/GPS/game player/wireless hub. Now in gray!

Cute Overload: A kitten licks a puppy while the puppy licks a bunny.

A translation, from a reader, indicates that the hackers have hacked not out of protest, but rather to leave an encouraging comment. It's a big love-in (they "would like to thank you on behalf of all of Iran's hackers"). Say what you will about Ahmadinejad, but the guy's getting better at PR every damn day.

Invalid RSS Feeds
I've known quite a few bloggers who's RSS feeds were broken for months on end. Now, don't get me wrong, even my RSS feed is broken from time-to-time. Software has bugs. You can prevent your feeds from breaking by simply subscribing to your feed in various RSS readers (especially the one you use) and double checking from time-to-time that you are getting stuff.

Well, it's true if they actually link back to you, but most a-listers have 100 people linking to them daily and it's highly unlikely your post will catch their eye. Instead, try linking to a broader range of bloggers. When you link to a d-list blogger, you're likely to gain a reader for life and several dozen links in return. I'm the ultimate d-lister and I make certain to return all Google juice in spades.

9. Putting Yourself on a Pedestal
This problem doesn't happen too often, but from time-to-time a-list and b-list bloggers lose control to their egos. They start posting about how great they are and commenting negatively about their own readers. I'm not sure if that works for other people, but I'm pretty quick to unsubscribe when a bloggers puts himself on a pedestal. If you are already heading down this path, then simply posts a few entries that make fun of yourself on a regular basis to keep yourself grounded and off that pedestal

Blogs are kind of a big deal. Everyone's heard of them and many folks read them daily. Technorati.com (a blog search engine) says that there are over 37.3 million blogs in the blog universe (or blogosphere as it's collectively known as). Technorati also ranks the top 100 blogs -- the REAL kings of the internet jungle.

These guys get more hits, RSS subscriptions, pageviews, and links than the average Internet surfer can shake a mouse at!

Out of Technorati's millions of tracked blogs, BetUS.com is taking bets on which blog will be #1 on their Top 100 list on New Years Eve.

But there's a real difference between what Share Your OPML is doing and other ranking systems. SYO is completely objective and shows exactly what content people are actually reading right now. Other ranking systems are either subjective, or forced to look at either different data (Technorati looks at links) or only data specific to their users (Bloglines ranks blogs based on subscriber numbers on Bloglines). Over time, SYO can become a true "long tail" recommendation engine if a wide swath of the users out there are willing to upload their OPML feed. And they are only a couple of steps away from being there.

SYO needs more users. My guess is a few thousand have already uploaded their reading lists, but it will take a lot more before the data is really reflective of what most people are reading. To do this, SYO needs to add more value than it currently does for users. New features have been rolling out over time that help do this. Since the last time I looked, SYO has added a top podcast list and a feed reader to the mix.

There's a top 100 list of the most popular feeds which could become the definitive top 100 list once there is a statistically relevant number of users (subject to SYO successfully controlling spam). You can also see other users that have similar reading habits as you (it’s called “subscriptions like mine”). Based on this last feature, John Tropea, Robert Scoble and Dave Winer are my closest matches. I may find other interesting feeds by perusing their lists.

Those of you paying attention to the Technorati 100 will have noticed that it is getting more international, due to the explosion of non-English blogs as Dave noted in State of the Blosphere. With today's update, the number one spot has changed from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin and friends to ?? ??? ??BLOG by Xu Jing Lei. Evidently a name starting with X is a big help -- perhaps Xiaxue will be next?

The problem is that Technorati does not index blog entries, but rather webpages. Technorati often reports referrers to my own blogs where the blogger is simply listing me in his sidebar blogroll. Actually, it wouldn't be so bad if I got one referrer from that sidebar link, but Technorati will often repeatedly give me referrers every time that blogger writes a new entry. So, we have a big problem. Is MSN Spaces gaming the Technorati index? Guess what, they are not. MSN Spaces is marking these automated links with NOFOLLOW attributes, as they are suppose to. I then went to the Technorati 100 and checked if they were including links with this attribute and found out they were. Why is Technorati including NOFOLLOW links in their rankings?

There are no political blogs on the list-they hadn't been invented yet. Actually, I got the impression that many bloggers got a bit shirty when political blogs started up, and started getting popular—politics (and especially right-wing politics) wasn't what the blog-powered future was supposed to be about. Blogs were supposed to be personal, thoughtful, witty, sincere, not brash and combative.

://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.

Now every website owner can see who's talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the "traffic" of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.

Unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results. And the longer we're able to gather data the more accurate the system will become. We hope this will provide publishers with a useful tool in tracking their sites and how their content is referenced by other websites.

A couple of hundred sites disappeared today (?) from the Top 100 Unique list. If this happening by purpose or if it's just a temporary software accident, I don't know. Maybe there is a good chance for you to get to know some highranked but unknown blogs now in the new Top 100 Uniques.

There's a lot of factors that go into any certain blogger placing on the list, and we actually do keep track of these factors and place people accordingly. Quality of writing, audience influence, general coolness, and the ability to write engaging material on a long-term basis are all reasons why someone would or wouldn't make the list.

We also maintain a running commentary on the blogosphere. Sure, there are several sites dedicated to this type of thing, but they take themselves far too seriously. We love blogging, and we love people who try and make blogging fun.

Huffington showed that it was still possible to quickly move up to the top of the charts. "You think the A-list is the A-list is the A-list," says David Sifry, the CEO of Technorati. "But I'm telling you, boy, does it shift—and does it shift fast." Cultural winds can drive blogs in and out of favor: When Sifry founded Technorati in 2002, many of the bloggers on his top-100-most-linked list were computer geeks, such as journalist Doc Searls and programmer Dave Winer. But as blogging grew to encompass politics and pop culture, Searls dropped to No. 96 and Winer to No. 126.

What's more, a blog is like a shark: If it stops moving, it dies. Without fresh postings every day-hell, every few minutes-even the most well-linked blog will quickly lose its audience. The A-listers cannot rest on their laurels. Federated Media owner John Battelle recently published a book on Google, and while on the book tour, he neglected his own well-trafficked blog (No. 81 on Technorati's rankings) for several days. "And suddenly I was getting all these e-mails going, 'If you don't get your shit together, I'm out of here,'" he recalls. He stayed up late that night frantically adding posts. "If you start sucking," he says, "it's through."

Here, let's play a game. Everyone in the world say "brrreeeport" on your blog and you'll be listed on this Technorati page automatically. Heh. There are also no pages on the Internet linked to for that term on Google, Yahoo, or MSN.

So, now you too can take down the man! Get your due! Get around the gatekeepers. Tell all those A list bloggers to screw off and die! Heheh. Or, you can let me own that term all by myself! Heheh.

Quick: go to Technorati and do the brrreeeport search. Now, which headline and opening text grabs you? Makes you wanna click? Hint: we're all being slammed with hundreds of sites every day. The more interesting you can make your headline, the better. Think about what your headline will look like in the search engines and use every one as an opportunity to grab a little bit of traffic.

Now, look at the 98 brrreeeport results on Technorati. All are on the same topic, right? But some headlines stand out from the noise. Which ones grab your eye? The one that says simply "brrreeeport report?" Or the one that says "brrreeeport beats Mohammad cartoon?" Conflict is a story telling device. Use it in headlines!

1. Any Authority: This will show all results.
2. A Little Authority: This will show results from blogs with at least one link.
3. Some Authority: This will show results from blogs with a handful of links.
4. A Lot of Authority: This will show results from blogs with hundreds of links.

Why so? Every blogger speaks to the world, and every post has the potential to set off a conflagration. So, he says, it makes sense to count the matches. It's true that the A-listers play a crucial role. They fan the flames. But by the time they're onto a nasty rumor, complaint, or embarrassment, according to Umbria, it's no longer just a flicker in the forest. It's a blaze. And by that point, you probably don't need a market intelligence company to tell you about it.

6. Can I get the same insights Umbria provides using a blog search engine?

No. Blog search engines use key word search queries and generate results in real-time, making it very difficult to remove "Splogs" (Spam blogs or fake blogs created to "spoof" or fool search engines and elevate these URLs in search engine rankings) and false positives (e.g., a search on "Apple Computer" that may yield results about someone eating an "apple" while working on their computer). Incidence of Splogs and false positive can skew analysis results by as much as 50%. Umbria has invested in some of the most robust blog spam and false positive detection capabilities available to ensure we produce high quality and highly accurate analysis results unavailable from blog search tools.

While I love comments-and would never consider turning them off on this blog-I don't quite grasp the notion that the conversation is somehow inhibited without comments. Blogging godfather Dave Winer hasn't offered comments on his blog for a long time, and has publicly dismissed the notion that a blog without comments isn't a blog. In a 15-month-old article in the Online Journalism Review that dealt with blog spam, Winer suggested it's painfully easy to comment on blogs that don't support comments: Commenters should simply run their own blog if they want to comment.

To that end, Winer recently introduced a subtle new feature to his blog. The little green Technorati icon appears above the fold in the right-hand column. Click it; it takes you to the Technorati page showing all items that link to Winer's blog. In other words, it's just like reading the comments left on a comment-enabled blog. Today, Winer notes that the tag has been successful (aside from some "snarky" feedback).

The search portion of the Best of the Web blog directory is still in beta, and should be "ready for release within the next 30 days. We are still tweaking the post functionality of the search – grabbing current content from the directory…kind of like Technorati does, without all the spam", according to Greg Hartnett from Best of the Web.

According to Hartnett, "we have been interested in blogging for about 18 months, and have been monitoring it closely for the last 12. We came up with the concept of the blog directory in July of this year, and began development shortly thereafter. We were able to draw off the experience of building the BOTW directory, and minor modifications of the underlying code enabled us to deploy an admin interface for it within days. From there, it was a matter of figuring out some of the taxonomy and filling in the blanks."

"As a citizen of the blogosphere, Feedster has always recognized the achievements of independent bloggers and publishers. Our Feed of The Day was created as an opportunity to honor a unique voice or technology from within the din of the web," says Alan Graham, Feedster’s Community Liaison. "We are taking this one step further with our "Feed of The Year" Countdown. During the entire month of December we will recognize some of the best contributors to the blogosphere from our own Feed of The Day list."

The idea that is circulating, and usually among those who have little or no concept of blogging, is people blog to become famous. The possibility could be true in many cases, as some bloggers do set out intentionally to blog for fame. It could even be argued that business people blog for that reason. If the goal is to spread the word about their business, then at least becoming better known is the motivation.

That said, fame is not likely the main driving force for most bloggers to set fingers to keyboard. Bloggers write to express themselves, and very often to extremely limited audiences. By the way, if you are one of those unfortunates, we should talk; or at least read my blog on a more regular basis.

Blogs and bloggers are so diversified, in their countless motivations and goals, that it's literally impossible to pigeonhole the reasons for starting a blog. With literally millions of blogs on the internet, similarity of thought and ideas went out of the window long ago. There are as many classifications of blogs, topics, and themes as there are numbers of blogs. It's a bit like counting grains of sand on a beach.

I'm sure that a search for bloggers who seek only fame, would turn up many examples. The opposite case is also true. A similar search for bloggers who go out of their way to avoid publicity for their blogs, beyond a select circle of readers, would also find large numbers.

So imagine the chafing that went on when Diller sat on stage a couple weeks ago in front of about 1,000 tech types and dismissed the buzz that says user-generated content, blogs and other "people's media" are poised to push traditional media aside.

"There aren't that many people in that many closets who are really talented and can't find their way out," Diller said. "Making a television program or a movie or a song — there are going to be relatively few who do that because there's simply not enough talent. Maybe that's an utter birdbrained statement, but there you are — it's mine."

At that, Diller grinned broadly, and the techie crowd murmured that Diller was stuck in the past and utterly clueless.

As with most things, I think the truth lies in the middle. Yes, Diller is right -- talent is rare, and when you marry it to new technologies, you've got something. But the fact that the end of the tail may be growing fatter suggests something else: those niche audiences are worth something too. Technology has enabled the little guys to connect with each other, find their audiences, and even make money. In fact, that's where the first revolution was -- eBay and Google aggregated the little guys, connected them, and monetized them. Last I heard, these were pretty valuable companies.

I should have picked up on this earlier, but am glad that Susan Mernit did. Out of the CNET list of top 100 bloggers, only a handful are women. Susan counts five, but we are on the list, so I count six eight.(Anita Campbell from RFID Weblog and Staci Kramer from paidContent point out that they're on the list "Not that it changes the numbers much, Kramer adds). I agree with Susan, this is an interesting list and though I am glad Blogspotting is on there, it can't be that hard to find good women bloggers....

For URL search, we've been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we've made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.

The change affects how Technorati ranks its over 18.5 million blogs. Our new link counts expose more active blogs and rising stars, allowing readers to discover blogs currently receiving the attention of the blogosphere.

Technorati determines a blog's ranking based on the number of links from unique blogs over the last 6 months. If John links to Susie 5 times in 5 months Technorati will count 5 new links to Susie from 1 unique source. Susie's rank will change based on this 1 new source.

What is still missing? User selection of the period of time used, and a way to select specific areas of authority. The typical query would be -- if Technorati would support this -- "show me the top 100 bloggers on the topic of "social media" based on their posts in the past 12 months". We need to open the model so that user preferences drive the searches, not some canned algorithm. And since Technorati has gone so far with tags, why not use those to determine topic?

I need this 500 list so bad that I’ll give an incentive: I’ll give $50,000 in advertising to the first person to come up with a better 100 list based on the feedback I’ve outline above (i.e. 500 folks, by links, based on the trailing 12 months, up and comer list, etc).

**Or** if some programmer out there wants to build this for Weblogs, Inc. I’ll pay you $10,000 in cash for a proper list straight up.

Of course, most blogs are mind-numbingly dull. You need to dig deep to find the gems and that is exactly what Best of The Web has done for you. We identify 100 of the best blogs in 20 categories ranging from Art and Literary blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music blogs.

The site provoked intense reaction, much of it critical. For example, Zero Boss (www.zeroboss.com) blogger Jay Allen (a B-lister) complained on his site, "Why would anyone hate bloggers enough to want to make celebrities out of them?" Others primarily seemed unhappy about their placement on the list, or total lack of inclusion. Several tried to lobby for promotions and a few sent hostile e-mails, according to the Blogebrity founders.

So, if you aspire to become Internet Famous, I guess I can tell you first hand it's fun, but it doesn't make you any more well known in the meatspace, really. It's more of a sideshow to see how people make a big deal of it. And I don't expect many people on that A-list to achieve lasting offline fame. Basically we're all still just dogs, right dawg? Woof. Woof.

The influential bloggers should be defined here. These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other influential A-list utopianist bloggers all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded bloggers, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion—an A-bomb of groupthink. You could get radiation sickness if you happen to be in the area. Except for Wired online and a few media bloggers, nobody is in the area, so nobody outside the groupthink community really cares about any of this. These explosions are generally self-contained and harmless to the environment.

The data became clearer. On that particular day, the top five bloggers created an average of 30 entries, with each entry being under 150 words. This reminds me of something Phillip Greenspun, another A-list blogger, had said about why he liked blogs:

     It allows me to experiments with the three paragraph form

Considering the size of the average entry from this, it seems very clear that an entry should be brief.

However, going beyond that is the number of entries that come in on a day. Looking at this, the average Top 5 A-list blogger wrote an average of almost 30 entries. Think about it for a second or two. 30 entries! It's a huge number for a single day.

Before becoming blogging guru to the academic elite, Winer founded and was chief executive of Millbrae, Calif.-based UserLand Software, which specializes in content-publishing tools and services. He wrote or contributed to a number of relevant specifications, including SOAP, XML-RPC, RSS and OPML. He is perhaps best known for launching Scripting News, one of the Internet's longest-running Web logs.

Back in the 1990s Drudge was a believer in the empowering potential of the internet. In a speech he said, "We have entered an era vibrating with the din of small voices. Every citizen can be a reporter, can take on the powers that be." Now he sounds disillusioned and says that the "din" is growing into a cacophony: "There’s a danger of the internet just becoming loud, ugly and boring with a thousand voices screaming for attention." He is no fan of the blogging phenomenon (weblogs linking sites): "I don’t read them. I like to create waves and not surf them. And who are these influential bloggers? You can’t name one because they don't exist."

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best ... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of Newsweek]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere ... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

Viewed one way, the issue seems a bit absurd. These self-generated personal Web sites are supposed to be the ultimate grass-roots phenomenon. The perks of alpha bloggers—voluminous traffic, links from other bigfeet, conference invitations, White House press passes—are, in theory, bequeathed by a market-driven merit system. The idea is that the smartest, the wittiest and the most industrious in finding good stuff will simply rise to the top, by virtue of a self-organizing selection process.