You’ve seen the Technorati top posts of a day, Daypop’s top 40, and others. They all show the “most popular” links of the day using a cumulative index, just counting the number in links to a particular subject. More sophisticated versions of the above would weight the links by the “power” of the blog doing the linking. Still, this aggregate data isn’t really interesting. It tells you a little about what’s popular, but only from a bird’s eye view.

What we need is a rate-based ranking system. Mark down the time on which other blogs link to a particular page, estimate trends, and use that data in addition to the cumulative data and weighting, and you will have a truer idea of what information is propogating around the blogosphere. For example, upward linear trends are more interesting than flatline trends. Exponential trends are the most interesting yet–even if the quality of the blogs individually is rather low, because it means that the link is highly valuable.

Timeline ranking could occur behind the scenes to add relevancy to “Top xx” lists, or it could be exposed with some sort of user-friendly chart. Either way, it would be an order of magnitude better than the current indices.