It's called "Tower Ticker," which from December 1948 to October 1981 was the name of the Chicago Tribune’s popular people column. This isn't that. It's more an expansion of the Tribune column I have been writing for the last 3˝ years (and, in some ways, the Chicago Sun-Times and Los Angeles Daily News columns I wrote for two decades before that). But I liked the name, the handle was available and worth dusting off for a revival.

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."

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?

Copeland does have some basis for that claim. "There are about 18 million people [currently] blogging," he said. Let's say that's the number of people who have set up blogs. The number of people actively blogging is, say, half of that. Of that number, how many regularly update content? How many update their blogs weekly, or even daily? The reality is there are maybe 10,000 to 100,000 really active (hourly or daily) bloggers who get significant traffic numbers.

Maybe 10,000 to 100,000 doesn't sound like very many active blogs. But consider this: There are 49,000 daily journalists in the U.S. Conceivably, there are more well-informed, active bloggers out there than active journalists. That's potentially tens of thousands of really influential people. People with an audience. An audience you can reach through their blogs.

"I'm never going to have the resources to compete with the big papers," Mr. Marshall said. He said his new site will be able to follow long simmering stories more consistently than mainstream outlets do. "A scrappy blog can provide a different service. I think there's a market out there for that," he said.

Mr. Marshall, whose site just marked its fifth anniversary, said he has spent the past six months seeking to professionalize the sale of advertising. A standard TalkingPointsMemo.com ad costs $500 a week through one ad-selling consortium, BlogAds.com. A premium ad can cost up to four times as much.

"We've got a backlog of orders already for next year for the political bloggers," the owner of BlogAds.com, Henry Copeland, said. "It's just really clear these guys are moving from making good money to making great money."