The Ecosystem

I'm not sure I understand the logic of truth laid bear ecosystem. Blogs are ranked by inbound links, ie who links to you. In this category, I currently am a Flippery Fish, 16,428 of all the blogs in the English speaking world. This is the result of 4 major links and a series of minor links.

The other measure of viewership is site traffic, these days it's at about 40 visits a day, which ranks 4,492 in the English speaking blog world.

My question is this: why are links privileged over traffic? Is it more important how many people read your postings or how many people link to your site?

I think it's a fairly decent question...Daily Kos gets 730,754 visitors a day whereas Instapundit gets 162,890. But Instapundit has 7581 links vs. Kos with 5391 links. To me, this means Instapundit is read by more bloggers, but Kos is read by more people. Hmmmm.