As pointed out in a recent Slashdot article some researchers at HP Labs have come up with what they have termed a Blog Epidemic Analyzer which aims to “track how information propagates through networks. Specifically...how web based memes get passed on from one user to another in blog networks“. It sounds like an interesting idea, it would be cool to know who the first person to send out links about All Your Base Are Belong To Us or I Kiss You. I can also think of more serious uses of being able to track down the propagation of particular links across the World Wide Web.

Unfortunately, it seems the researchers behind this are either being myopic or have to justify the cost of their research to their corporate masters by trying to compare what they've done to Google. From the  Blog Epidemic Analyzer FAQ

2. What's the point?

There has been a lot of discussion over the fairness of blogs, powerlaws, and A-list bloggers (You can look at the discussion on Many2Many for some of the highlights). The reality is that some blogs get all the attention. This means that with ranking algorithms like Technorati's and Google's Page Rank highly linked blogs end up at the top of search pages. Sometimes (maybe frequently) this is what you want. However, it is also possible that you don't want the most connected blog. Rather you would like to find the blog that discovers new information first.

The above answer makes it sound like these guys have no idea what they are talking about. Google and Technorati do vastly different things. The fact that Google's search engine lists highly linked blogs at the top of search results that they are tangentially related to is a bug. For example, the fact that a random post by Russell Beattie about a company now makes him the fifth result that comes up for a search for that comapny in Google isn't a feature, it's a bug. The goal of Google (and all search engines) is to provide the most relevant results  for a particular search term. In the past, tying relevance to popularity was a good idea but with the advent of weblogs and the noise they've added to the World Wide Web this is becoming less and less of a good idea. Technorati on the other hand has one express purpose, measuring weblog popularity based on incoming links.

The HP iRank algorithm would be a nice companion piece to things like Technorati and BlogPulse but comparing it to Google seems like a stretch.