The blog-tracking firm Technorati has come up with a new release - the 'Technorati Attention Index', which rates online media sites on the basis of 'maximum links,' thereby determining the influence of mainstream media sites in the blogosphere.

Since linking can be considered a somewhat accurate measure of a blog's influence, Technorati Authority is gauged in terms of the number of blogs that link to a particular blog - and hence, the more links, the higher the authority!

The new Attention Index by Technorati evaluates the source of bloggers' information from the mainstream media.

Technorati opines there is a symbiotic link between blogs and mainstream media sites - bloggers more often than not link to media sites, which happen to be their key sources of information!

In fact, it has been observed that, at least 61 percent of the time, bloggers principally source one another; though they also link to non-blog web sites nearly 46 percent of the time.

The Technorati Attention Index will put forth a list of "most influential" web sites each month, depending on the number of blogs that link to them. Over the past one month, out of the fifty sites - in sequential order of authority - the order of top five sites that maximum bloggers linked to went thus: YouTube; New York Times; BBC News; CNN; and MSN.