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.