Node reputation is supposed to be a indicator of popularity already.

Knowing only that there's a link from one node to another doesn't tell you much. Even PageRank takes into account the referring context; otherwise you'd rank a page highly only because there are 100 references to it saying "This is the most asinine, thoughtless comment ever".

Rep measures popularity. Trackbacks measure relevance. I'm not going to link to an existing node because I really like it; I'm going to link to it because it relates to the node I'm creating now.

The idea of counting references to articles is fairly widespread in the scientific and engineering communities; a big chunk of "reputation" is how many other workers reference your articles. See, for example, Generalized h-index for Disclosing Latent Facts in Citation Networks.

Frequency of citation is similar to, but not identical with, popularity. As an example, I would guess that no matter how many upvotes a responses in a poll, regardless of how many upvotes they get, are probably not the targets of many links.

emc

Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards.

Vernon Sanders Law