Talk about good timing, or maybe just the power of the Blogosphere, this academic paper via Joho the Blog about makes interesting reading considering my attempts at mapping and aggregating my blog "cosmos":
"our conclusion that the intensity of traffic directed to a blog through search engines (which use traditional page-rank algorithms) does not seem to correlate with the “real” popularity of the blog, suggests that social-network-based navigation may be playing an increasingly important role in web navigation in general, and blogosphere navigation in particular. On that count we note that in blogspace, the popularity of a blog is more a reflection of its owner’s social attributes (e.g., celebrity status, reputation, and public image) than a reflection of the number and rank of other blogs or web pages that point to it. This highlights the need for the development of page-rank algorithms that take into consideration the social attributes of blogosphere actors"
Based on the data I've seen coming out of Google and Technorati, I think there is a lot of work to be done to improve this space. A good start would be to produce rankings along the lines of the Tipping Point, i.e. who are the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
BTW If you have trouble accessing the article in question, try this cached Google version instead.
I think some of the older, well-established blogs do have a high page rank.
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