When I began following, it was Instapundit, Kos, and Atrios who were usually the top 3. Interesting how Atrios has slipped to ninth behind the likes of Power Line and Captain's Quarters.

I suspect that the Volokh Conspiracy is much more likely to be linked for "hey, look at what these smart people said" instead of for "hey, look what an insanely stupid thing this person said!"

Nevertheless, the only thing worse than being negatively talked about is not being talked about at all.

Anderson: You nailed it.

Anderson has a point. Malkin is getting lots of links because she has more of an ability to piss people off than Reynolds. How does one get irate about "heh"? During the Kelo decision, I had spikes in traffic from both Malkin and Instapundit, and in terms of generating traffic Reynolds is still head and shoulders above Malkin.

I wonder if Glenn suffers from success to a degree. I know that there have been a couple times that I have mentioned Glenn or Instapundit and been lazy about linking because, well, he's Glenn--while I would never do that to basically any other blog.

It isn't my practice, but I know I have done it, and wonder how many others have as well.

Interesting, and as previously noted by Anderson, Malkin tends to generate more scandal, more bile, more hatred than Reynolds. Usually the people who hate Reynolds are the techie types who think his style is ruining the WWW, but Malkin, she gets both fawning response and bilious bites from all over the place.

And yet, as observed too, Glenn has the upper hand in terms of traffic both received and generated, but his incoming links usually consit of hat tips.

Yeah, Malkin gets a lot of links from left-wing blogs noting how crazy they think she is.

I've long been surprised at the sheer number of links Glenn maintains, simply because of the style of most posts. One is more likely to link a substantive post than a "here's an interesting link, go look" type of post that makes up the bulk of his blogging. Inject laziness and/or poor etiquette in "hat tipping" things seen via Glenn, and the links will be less than they might.

And then there's the controversy/fawning combo mentioned here as well.

My first inkling she'd made #1 came in a post I saw yesterday analyzing the top 20 in the Ecosystem. I'd not checked the Ecosystem lately, in part because it is so far out of touch, and in part because I am no longer an obsessed newbie, and in part because of the trend toward takeover of the top by journalists and celebrities. I was surprised by much of the makeup of the top 20. The blogosphere is not what it once was.

Yeah, Malkin gets a lot of links from left-wing blogs noting how crazy they think she is.

It's not just the left-wing ones.