PSoTD

One of the things that might make sense to study by a journalism or communications department at some highly appreciated university would be the blog links to various publications, and whether they increase or decrease over time. This would have to be somehow compared by taking a large population of blogs over time, maintaining a total population number to publication links for various time periods, and then measuring a percentage per publication of those links. In the political world, for example, the entire blogging spectrum would need to be covered, and the entire online political publication community should be measured.

My suspicion is that Slate would have a very ominous downward trend, because of newsworthiness and interest level in the quality of the articles.