Evaluating blog traffic has always been a dicey proposition.

There have been many attempts, with many different methodologies. There were blogrolls, hits, unique visitors, all sorts of nonsense.

Feedster has recently adjusted their methodology. They try to count all links, and discount the spam ones. The most interesting innovation here is the tag cloud, which you can see to the right of the list. Notice that popular tags are bigger than less-popular ones. The biggest remain politics and tech, followed by gadgets (which is a sub-set of tech). (Oh, and let's not forget to send a little link love to Robert Scoble (number 76), who turned me on to this.

What's interesting here is that these are subjects for which print publishers either have poor publishing models or failing ones. If you were invested in computer magazines over the last decade, you lost your shirt. Political publications have always been money holes.

As you will note from the headline, Corante is number 21 on the list, with 18,446 adjusted links. That's well ahead of such reportedly popular sites as Gawker, TalkingPointsMemo, Eschaton and Kottke..

You can see some of the unfairness right there.

Here I'm comparing a whole bunch of people (of which I'm proud to be one) to the sites of individuals. And, in fact, the big MSM blogging headline of 2005 has been the rise of "group blogs," so-called blogs that are actually running some sort of Community Network Service, like Dailykos (number four on the list), and the Huffington Post (number seven).

So let's be fair, with a bunch of group blogs Corante out-polled:

• IT Conversatoins
  
• Blogcritics
  
• RedState
  BloggingLA
  
• Kuro5Hin
  

And that's just in the first 150.Don't you wish there were some solid business models on that list somewhere?

But it's attitude, notoreity, and outrageousness that continue to dominate the list. MichelleMalkin is number eight, the top-rated conservative blog of them all. That's bigger than Instapundit, bigger than Powerline, bigger than Little Green Footballs. AndrewSullivan, who just moved his act over to Time Inc., has less than half her traffic. I will leave the conclusions on that to you.

I encourage you to play with the whole list. You'll find a lot of stuff here that is off your beaten track, blogs you have never visited before. And some you'll want to visit again. I think that's the real value of a list like the Feedster 500.

You're already smart enough to come here, after all.