New metric for understanding blog’s influence

From Mary’s Napsterization:

A discussion about creating a new metric for understanding blogs is something I think the community should have the chance to participate in to find a different way of perceiving a blog, or the ripples a blog makes. Partly I believe this because of the frustration people express about Google’s secret algorithm for pagerank, where they feel something this powerful should not be secret (update: the algorithm is not secret but the ordering of the search results is secret). And partly because I see that blogging is a opportunity for people to talk transparently, so why shouldn’t the algorithm used to express our weight in the blogosphere also be open. Bloggers should have input about the importance of one social gesture over another, one metric over another, and know what it is that is included because it will be used to describe them. And also, I cannot assume that the ways I read blogs is the same as everyone else, so I’d rather have a community algorithm in the sense that the community has commented on the weight of some metrics over others within the algorithm, and not just assume that the ways I or others in the blog search community are correct.