first step involved in deciding a quality score has the search engine obtaining information about a blog document. that information may be from:

the blog itself,
the post,
metadata from the blog, and/or;
one or more feeds associated with the blog document.

the next step is to identify positive indicators of quality:

popularity of the blog,
implied popularity of the blog,
inclusion of the blog in blogrolls,
existence of the blog in high quality blogrolls,
tagging of the blog,
references to the blog by other sources,
a pagerank of the blog, and;
other indicators could also be used.

what google says about each of those:

popularity

popularity could be based upon news aggregator subscriptions:

a blog document having a high number of subscriptions implies a higher quality for the blog document. also, subscriptions can be validated against "subscriptions spam" (where spammers subscribe to their own blog documents in an attempt to make them "more popular") by validating unique users who subscribed, or by filtering unique internet protocol (ip) addresses of the subscribers.

implied popularity

instead of explicit subscriptions, an "implied popularity" could be calculated from data collected from people searching on blog search, and examining the click stream of search results:

for example, if a certain blog document is clicked more than other blog documents when the blog document appears in result sets, this may be an indication that the blog document is popular and, thus, a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

inclusion of the blog in blogrolls

blogrolls are a dense collection of links to external sites (usually other blogs) in which the author/blogger is interested. a blogroll link to a blog document is an indication of popularity of that blog document, so aggregated blogroll links to a blog document can be counted and used to infer magnitude of popularity for the blog document.

existence of the blog in high quality blogrolls

a high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers. therefore, a high quality blogroll that also links to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document.

this is also based upon the assumption that a well-known or trusted blogger would not link to a "spamming blogger."

[emphasis, and righteous indignation, ours.]

the article goes on, discussing other factors such as tagging of the post, position of the post on the page, etc. it's very interesting and written so non-techie schlubs like us can understand it.

the bottom line is, there is no way that markos, being the i t guy that he is, didn't take into consideration the effect his roll purge would have on search engine result placement for liberal blogtopia (y!wctp!) in general.

and this brings us back to our original point which we tried to make back in february when the the fiasco began. if markos, and to a lesser extent, duncan, had only dumped skippy's humble site from their rolls, we would not be bringing the matter up over and over and over and over and over again.

we would have pouted, and swore to never mention their names again, and bought some dryer's slow churned cookies n' cream and complained to ourselves how little we get back in return for the literally minutes we spend, every day, copying and pasting other people's work from legitimate news organs and then making snarky remarks about it.

but what markos, and to a lesser extent, duncan, did was to injure liberal blogtopia (y!wctp!) as a whole in the arena of national media availability.

it was, among others, jon swift who pointed out that the conservative blogs are ironically quite liberal with their blogroll links. and, when google searching any number of stories, you may notice that more often than not there appears a higher number of conservative (vs. liberal) blogs in the search results.

now you know why. and now you know why we continue to make a fuss about the blogroll purge. it doesn't just hurt our feelings. it hurts liberal blogs' ability to be recognized in daily news searches. and techie markos would have had to have known this, if we can use the passive-aggressive voice.

we have, we are sure you are glad to hear, nothing left to say about this (tho we reserve the right to kvetch later on). we want to, however, announce the addition of liberal catnip to skippy's blogroll, in our continuing amnesty day program. remember, unlike some blogs, if you link to skippy, skippy will link to you!