Ad fever on blogs fuels list-mania

Actually, the ranking pages don't send a lot of traffic. Technorati sends Engadget like 300-400 folks a day--AND THAT'S FOR BEING ON THE HOMEPAGE!!!

What is does do it provide awareness of what blogs are being linked to (aka "talked about").

However, we have blogs with 20x as much traffic LOWER then blogs with just 5% of the traffic on some of these rankings.

Frankly, inbound link is a HORRIBLE way to measure blogs. Traffic is the most important thing in terms of getting advertising.

I think you have this backwards. Surely ranking is a consequence of traffic & money far more than it is a cause? Elvis gets to number one on billboard because people buy the record. A lot less people buy the record because it is number one....

Advertisers who measure influence by traffic will do themselves a disservice.

A lot of so-called A-list blogs don't have huge numbers of visitors daily. What matters is: who reads, not how many; how long readers spend on the blog; and how many people read the blog on RSS readers instead of visiting the site. Right now, there is no reliable way to measure the number of subscribers to a blog's RSS feeds. Most blogs have several feeds and each reader seems to have a different method for showing subscribers.

Inbound links and trackbacks are important. But there is no accurate way -- including Technorati, whose information is often out of date, or just wrong -- to measure either links or trackbacks right now.