I promise I won’t be getting in to this business, ever, but someone else has. Blogrunner ranks “the most influential reporters and bloggers on the web” by two measures: the first is based on the total number of inbound links to unique postings/articles for each author; this, as the site notes, “favors industrious bloggers and underrepresents the influence [in the blogosphere, not the real world] of reporters and columnists who only contribute one or two pieces a week.”

The second measure “averages out the number of inbound links over the number of posts contributed by each author”–so it’s a better measure, as it were, of the amount of impact/influence per posting.

Let’s call the first the Total Impact measure, the second the Per Posting Impact Measure. (These measures seem to be updated quite a lot, so the figures quoted below may well change before long.) On the Total Impact measure, Paul Krugman comes out a mere 9th, behind such law professor bloggers as Eugene Volokh (UCLA) and Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds (Tennessee). By Per Capita Impact, however, Krugman is #1, which seems a bit more realistic.

Here’s how the law and philosophy professors on these lists fare (the lists only go up to 200, in the first case, 179 in the second):

TOTAL IMPACT
1. Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee Law)
6. Eugene Volokh (at Volokh Conspiracy) (UCLA Law)
25. Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law)
59. David Bernstein (at Volokh Conspiracy) (George Mason Law)
119. Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
152. Brian Leiter (Texas Law and Philosophy)
178. Randy Barnett (at Volokh Conspiracy) (BU Law)

PER POSTING IMPACT
89. Eugene Volokh (UCLA Law)
96. Randy Barnett (at Volokh Conspiracy) (BU Law)
100. Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee Law)
106. Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
110. David Bernstein (at Volokh Conspiracy) (George Mason Law)
147. Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law)
155. Brian Leiter (Texas Law and Philosophy)

There are surprising absences from this list: where is Larry Solum (San Diego Law)? where is Brian Weatherson (Brown, soon-to-be Cornell Philosophy)? Where are the Crooked Timber philosophers: Weatherson again, Chris Bertram (Bristol), Harry Brighouse (Wisconsin)? Go figure.