how do you measure blogger influence?

Mary Hodder, speaking at the Blog Business Summit about The Live Web, encourages folks to set up search feeds in various services to see how you (or your company or your product or anything you care about) is being bandied about the blogosphere:

The link metrics used to weigh bloggers' influence, and why the counts differ from service to service:

• Technorati: counts of all inbound link sources for last 6 months
• Bloglines: the count of all links for all time and the subscription counts
• Sphere: uses links plus other weights for relevance
• Feedburner: counts subscribers (but only for owners of those feeds)

How subscription metrics can differ:
Example based on BoingBoing traffic in August 2005:

• measured in Bloglines: 26,856 subscribers
• measured in Feedburner, 1.2 million subscribers to feed
• why the difference? Feedburner shows all subscriptions whereas Bloglines just those results of who subscribes to the feed using Bloglines

Possible other metrics you can use to judge the relative "influence" of a blog (no one tool out there will give you all these, you need find these yourself for the better picture they paint). You're a smart person and can interpret the pattern painted by the below better than any program could:

• inbound links: to a specific post URL
• inbound links: to the blog's URL
• comments to posts
• frequency of blogging a topic
• subscribers to RSS feeds and blogs
• incoming traffic links
• outbound blogroll
• tagged URLs (like those captured in del.icio.us)

So how do you find the influencers out in the blogosphere?

• read posts, comments and follow conversations
• find communities of self-tagged bloggers in Technorati by topic
• find communities of sphere lists
• look for the link and subscription counts of those who link to you, BUT high numbers are indications of popularity (not authority, don't confuse the two)
• look for key word and tag references to photos, blog posts, URLs and to you...