Snowballs and blogs

Gordon Smith has a snowball theory of blog traffic: 

as a blog becomes more popular, it receives more links, thus improving its Google PageRank, which in turn results in more Google hits, thus making the site more popular.

This is an important aspect of my theory of blogs, in my Initial Reflections on the Law and Economics of Blogging -- new and improved version just up, to be presented later this month at the Canadian Law and Economics annual meeting in Toronto. I argue that the Google ranking system is a Hayekian pricing mechanism that provides quality signals and incentives.  This is what helps make bloggers more than the pajamahadin mainstream critics imagine when they think of this medium.