This chart visually illustrates the number of mentions from blogs to columnists in the previously-defined “punditsphere” in each of the last four years up until September 17, 2007 (see the source data). Each year is illustrated by a different color:

Hovering over a segment will show the number of references tallied. The numbers generated below are from a Google search based on 5 results per page, and starting from the 30th result; this I found supplied fairly consistent numbers (for some combinations, Google Blog Search would inexplicably return no results). Clicking on each segment will bring up the Google results in a separate window. The numbers will likely not match, but are more or less close (I have yet to do the math on how much Google’s result counts variesclick to click).

The writers are ordered by the number of posts in the last year. This helps illustrate the movement in the last year relative to the previous three.

	Columnist/Blogger	10k 20k 30k 40k 50k 60k 70k 80k
1	Michelle Malkin
2	Andrew Sullivan
3	Christopher Hitchens
4	Thomas Friedman
5	Paul Krugman
6	Hugh Hewitt
7	David Brooks
8	Glenn Greenwald
9	George Will
10	Frank Rich
11	William Kristol
12	Mark Steyn
13	Pat Buchanan
14	Maureen Dowd
15	Jonah Goldberg
16	Josh Marshall
17	Robert Novak
18	Arianna Huffington
19	Kevin Drum
20	Michael Barone
21	Charles Krauthammer
22	Mickey Kaus
23	David Broder
24	Joe Klein
25	Peggy Noonan
26	Bob Herbert
27	Richard Cohen
28	David Corn
29	Dan Froomkin
30	E.J. Dionne
31	Rich Lowry
32	Nicholas Kristof
33	Eugene Robinson
34	David Ignatius
35	Fred Barnes
36	Fareed Zakaria
37	Charlie Cook
38	Michael Kinsley
39	Jeff Jacoby
40	Jonathan Chait
41	Ellen Goodman
42	Jonathan Alter
43	Anne Applebaum
44	Tony Blankley
45	Stanley Fish
46	Clarence Page
47	Roger Cohen
48	Paul Gigot
49	Judith Warner
50	Chris Suellentrop

Overall, the general trend seems to square with our expectations. There is a Top 7 group who have been referenced greather than 35,000 times over all. Three are the Times top stars. Three are bloggers. The other is the beyond-category: Christopher Hitchens.

The presence of Hitchens in the top 7 without benefit of a Times-like institution or a blog followship to buoy him gives a hint to his raw influence. Hitchens is the Kevin Bacon (or Lois Weisberg or Burgess Meredith) of punditry, who by virtue of his rhetorical agility is probably adored (and despised) by more diverse circles than anybody. He also brings more conviction to his writing than any on the list or off. In the newest issue of Vanity Fair, Hitchens wrote a touching elegy for Mark Daily, a young man from California who graduated U.C.L.A. and then joined the Army and marched off to Iraq, only to die when an I.E.D. blew up his Humvee; Hitchens was drawn to Daily’s tragic story after reading that his own writings had “deeply inspired” Daily to serve. Whether the same has been said of #11 on the list, William Kristol, or #1, Michelle Malkin, I do not know.

On casual glance, the graph appears to illustrates a “long tail” that has long been assumed in weblog metrics. But in this case, the salient feature of the tail is that it is thick; it does not drop off enough (The title of a March 2007 Forrester research report by Jaap Favier has suggested a similar shyft of terminology). We’ll examine this next.