Indeed. The primary metric by which bloggers are judged is popularity, which we long ago dismissed as being a terrible measure of value. Popular books, popula

Indeed. The primary metric by which bloggers are judged is popularity, which we long ago dismissed as being a terrible measure of value. Popular books, popular music, popular movies, popular television -- these are rarely our best works. It's as though we've forgotten this on the web though, and re-instituted a hierarchy of who matters that is based on meticulously engineered stacks of grade-A bullshit, which, surprise, surprise, favors peddlers of distraction and get-rich-quick schemes of all sorts. We've replaced "Old Media" with "Tomorrow's Old Media". Technorati even equates machine-estimated popularity with "Authority", a dangerously loaded word and wholly inaccurate besides. Certainly popularity means something, but it doesn't say much at all about whether any person, even someone in the ostensible target audience, should pay any attention at all.