There are a couple of theories about makes a good weblog, good being open to interpretation. For my purposes, I’ll defined good as shorthand for something readers regularly visit and find useful enough to interact with, either by leaving a comment there, by sending around URLs to their friends, commenting on their own site, etc.
Traffic numbers are not all that useful, with all the robots and spambots roaming about: if we all get the same amount of that, low-traffic sites will have a disproportionately high ratio of bots to readers.
Likewise, blogrolls and technorati fail my test: they can be a whim of the moment and are not an indicator of how much a site is valued by its readers.
I think the best measure is a comments:entries ratio. Values of 1 or greater equate to a high level of interaction . For sites that aren’t open to comments, something like feeds.scripting.com will have to do. My C:E ratio right now is .644: there was a time when it was greater than 1 but the whole Voodoo Magick Box meme died down.
So by this yardstick, Instapundit, for all its creator’s prolixity, garners very little status, while Crooked Timber and Freedom To Tinker do rather better.