Attention as power

Just downloaded Yahoos My Web2 and also tried to understand how links are make in technorati. In new economy attention or recognision is power. We use to think that media is a power and know it is the number of bloggers are "linked" to your site.

This is a criteria for search engines to show and different social software to evaluate the reliability of the content - authority?

You can check how well this works by looking at the most popular links.
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/

socialcomputing journalism citizen+journalism