"blogdex [a project at the mit media laboratory] is a system built to harness the power of personal news, amalgamating and organizing personal news content into one navigable source, moving democratic media to the masses. at current, blogdex is focused on the referential information provided by personal content, namely using the timeliness of weblogs to find important and interesting content on the web."
07/30/01 update: Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex.
08/15/01 update: blogdex news ("this page is devoted to helping people understand this work-in-progress, and also provides a useful feedback channel").
10/02/01 update: Daypop has a top 40.