The response to my recent request for blogrolls has been gratifying. (I'm left-handed, and so is the merchandise here.)

But it brings me back to a subject near to my heart, namely, the lack of good measuring sticks for blog importance.

Much as I like being blogrolled, a permanent link is not a valid measure. People just don't clean up their blogrolls obsessively. Calpundit Kevin Drum moved to the Washington Monthly months ago and is still on the permanent rolls of hundreds of other blogs, at his old URL. The last entry for the Iraqi blog Where is Raed is dated April 10, but some 583 blogs still list him on their rolls.

Both political parties engage in the blogrolling game. New political blogs list all the "big blogs" on their side of the aisle (often without reading them) to keep those blogs at the top of the list. That's really why political blogs seem so universally popular, in my view -- political types care about who's on their roll.

Technorati has switched to counting links and locations, but I don't know how often they really update their counts. None of my recent blogbacks are there, although the site does a decent job indicating a new link to an individual item (which lets me thank the blogger).

I know. If we tried to do traffic counts on blogs, most wouldn't measure up. But the number of site visitors you're getting is at least a valid measuring stick, something you can use to sell ads against.

As it is first-mover advantage reigns supreme. The top blogs are top blogs because they're top blogs. Unless you get a huge publicity boost (as Raed did) it's very, very hard to move up in the rankings. RSS is cool, but...

All of which leads to the bete noir (the bad thing) of this post. Google.

They've owned Blogger for over a year now but the only thing they seem to have done is mess with RSS. (Newsreaders now need to support three syndication formats -- RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom.) Yes, the new software is easier to use, with a one-time sign-up for comments. But it's really just one small step for blogger-kind, and we need giant leaps.

Google could easily measure blogs, accurately. It could define them as well -- Slashdot should be in a different category from Daily Kos which should be in a different category from MooresLore. Blogs should be defined by general subject, by the number of authors, by features, and by traffic. This would be incredibly valuable information for the community to have.

But we don't have it. So a few top bloggers wind up with jobs, a few others claim to make money, and the rest of us scratch around, waiting for some newly-hired New York Timesman to throw us a bone, show off the media's ignorance, and then ignore us for another year.

We need better tools, people.