Daypop's Top 40, Popdex and the other services allow writers to see almost instantly how many sites are linking to their stories. Is such information useful, or simply a popularity linking contest?

Imagine a character similar to Kasey Casem, doing some sort of bizarro version of the Top 40 hits but with a twist: He's counting down the most popular Web sites based on how many bloggers link to them. "And hitting the top of the charts today...July 28, 2003... reaching the toppermost of the poppermost...or at least the top of Popdex...is Robert X. Cringely's PBS Online column on Snapster, Son of Napster!"

Congratulations, Bob. You've hit the top of the blogger popularity chart -- or at least one of them. Got any plans to go to Disneyland? Uh, Bob? Anyone home? It turns out that the longtime technology columnist doesn't read Weblogs, and doesn't follow the charts at all.

"Never," he told me via e-mail. "If I was smarter than I am or had more time than I do, or if I gave a damn, I would do this, but you know I just don't want to. That's strictly because I find Weblogs to be a self-indulgent and (here's the big criticism) reactive medium. These people aren't generating much news, just reacting to it and pointing to it. ... I just don't have time for it. I'm actually out there finding news to write about the old-fashioned way."

But newfangled times call for newfangled measures, and plenty of online journalists are getting some satisfaction at seeing stories shoot up the Weblog charts. Next to page views and hit counts, the blog indexes are a good way to see if your story has people talking -- with either good or bad feedback. Plus, marketing folks at media companies are starting to watch them, and PR people are using them to track companies and product releases, according to David Sifry, who runs Technorati.

While Popdex is focused on one main general popularity chart, sites such as Technorati let you simply punch in the URL of your article and find who's linking to you -- what the site calls your "Link Cosmos." Technorati provides a quick, deep view, with links to those referring blogs as well as a brief blurb for context. Though Sifry only started the service last November, Technorati already checks more than 800,000 Weblogs, and the median time it takes to index a new post from a blog is 15 minutes.

Beyond narcissism

Sifry said he started the site because he "wanted a tool to figure out who's talking about me" and his own Weblog. But he also wanted to find similar conversations, and join circles with similar interests online. While most Web ratings services haven't got their arms around the reach of blogs, Sifry said the rate of new Weblogs coming into existence is mushrooming. That rate was 2,000 to 3,000 new blogs per day last November, 4,000 to 5,000 per day this past March, and is now about 7,000 to 9,000 per day. Watch out when AOL offers Weblogs in its wide launch of AOL Journals.

Though Technorati started as a side project for Sifry, it's starting to get more of his time, with two media outlets paying for special packages to help track their stories -- and the competition's. Sifry can't name the outlets, but said that many journalists are using his service to gauge feedback on their work -- "people will call you on your BS," he said -- and doing research to find authoritative sources. "Some journalists contacted me during the blackout and wanted to find blogs covering the blackout," he told me. "I just pointed them to the site."

Popdex and Daypop are still side projects for their respective owners, while Blogdex is run through MIT's Media Lab. Daypop's Daniel Chan said a lot of journalists check out his charts, such as the Top 40 or Top News. "Ego surfing is a common occurrence, and one of Daypop's features is the ability to check the number of links to a story," he told me via e-mail. " I think everyone likes to know if their hard work is paying off. In the case of writers, they all want to know how widely read their articles are."

Leander Kahney, a reporter for Wired News who often covers Net culture, is one who will admit to chart watching. "I check [all the indexes] daily, sometimes several times a day," he said. "Why? Vanity, mostly. I'm usually gauging the response to my stories. I'm curious to see how high in the rankings the stories climb, who is linking to them, and what is being said about them."

But Kahney also said he uses the charts for story ideas -- though he'd rather beat the blogosphere to a story, when possible. "I also use the lists to find new, interesting blogs," he said. "If someone's interested in something I've written, chances are they'll be interested in things I haven't yet written about." Kahney said he likes Daypop and Blogdex to follow a story's popularity arc, but he especially likes Technorati's "Link Cosmos" for being "incredibly comprehensive."

Reporting or navel-gazing?

David Ian Miller, Kahney's editor at Wired News, said substantial traffic to his site comes from bloggers and the indexes, though he can't quantify that yet. Miller said he uses the charts to watch how other media outlets are doing. "I also think it's really interesting to see more conventional media start to do Weblogs themselves," he said. "We're talking about doing it [at Wired News], but it's so time-consuming for reporters, taking them away from working on stories."

Of course, not everyone is enamored of the blogosphere. Andrew Orlowski, a controversial reporter/commentator for British tech site The Register, said his stories chart often, but he downplays the blog effect on traffic. One of his stories about Google's "blog noise" hit the top of all the major blog indexes in May. But he said it was among the least-read stories posted to The Register site that day. It is possible, however, that many bloggers didn't agree with the gist of the story -- and were telling their readers to avoid it.

Orlowski, like Cringely, said he sees the charts as the ultimate in navel-gazing. "I think they're a terrific symptom of the guilt and insecurity that's felt by the media in the United States," he told me via e-mail. "With some justification, readers view journalists as a self-regarding caste. Journalists fret that they're out of touch. But to do great writing, journalists should take their eye off the focus groups -- especially a focus group as self-selecting and unrepresentative as Webloggers -- and be bold, courageous and original."

It's true that there's a self-referential nature to blog linking, bartering links, and rankings. If you look at Popdex's Top 100 "Most popular links of all time," you'll find Popdex itself at No. 10. And the most popular stories on the indexes tend to be about Weblogs themselves, or about technology.

Still, the primitive nature of the indexing tools today will mature over time, providing a better mechanism for tracking online feedback on stories, gauging interest in subject matter and even finding online trends. While some journalists may choose not to go there right now, the blog indexes might play a major role in online journalism in the future. How much of that will be vanity, and how much of that will be useful information, is anyone's guess.