I've had these pages open in Safari tabs for nearly a week now... I guess I'll post them so I can close the tabs..

Who Has the Most Readers? Weblog Fan-Favourites

Who Reads the Most Weblogs? Weblogger MegaReader Rankings

Those pages were fed by the old old weblogs.com per-member favorites info. The first weblogs.com incarnation had a centralized datastore of blogrolls maintained manually by each member. Using that and weblogs.com's changes.xml I was able to show rankings, allow you to surf from weblog to weblog through readership relationships, and see how "fresh" the weblog was.

Dave Winer is doing similar things now with his OPML-based system. The information isn't quite as rich because (if I remember correctly) the OPML input files he receives don't contain quite as much information as we used to have in weblogs.com's favourites database, but it's pretty close. Some of the other features my app had are just a matter of extra number crunching or a few extra associations with other data, like changes.xml.

I think it's cool that something so close can now be constructed again, and that this time the input is decentralized!

Dave, feel free to plunder any feature from my old pages and add it to your new system. Some of the data might not be available, but maybe that can lead to richer data formats (or maybe not).