If you’re like most folks, you’ve often wondered, “So just what does Mike Barnicle think about God, anyway?” Well, Barnicle, a regular on Don Imus’ morning program and a fixture on MSNBC’s Web site, obliged this week, giving a big thumbs-up to “Allah, Jesus, The Lord, Christ, The Big Guy, Numero Uno” for sticking by humanity through Kosovo and Littleton. (Surprisingly, the former Boston Globe columnist, who resigned his post last year amid charges of plagiarism and fabrication, did not praise the Creator for His much-touted ability to href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new?id=RsvGene&images=images/modeng&data=/lv2/english/relig/rsv&tag=public&part=6&division=div1">speak truth through parables.)

I might be tempted here to critique Barnicle for clichis (“You can talk to Him anytime and the number is never busy”), bathos (“God is more wired than the Internet … Hey, for all I know, He might even be a chick”) or general neo-Miltonic presumptuousness (“God knows there’s only so much that can be done on Earth”). But you know, why bother? What the hell do I know? Fact is, the people have spoken, and they have declared that the former journalistic pariah is, consistently, one of the best things going on MSNBC. And he’s got the numbers to prove it.

How? Users of MSNBC’s Web site, in addition to selecting news by category or a href="http://www.msnbc.com/news/summary.asp?a">quick news summary, can now surf straight to a list of href="http://www.msnbc.com/top10.asp">top 10 stories, ranked by other MSNBC readers on a scale of 1 to 7, a competition in which Barnicle places regularly in the 6-plus range. This and other reader-interactivity features — before its redesign, Salon briefly experimented with listing its most popular articles — like Dr. Johnson’s dog standing on its hind legs, don’t prove much yet except that they can be done. Still, the fact that anybody uses the feature at all — that thousands of people are willing to rate weather news free of charge — says something about the potential of revolutionary communications mechanisms to democratize the flow of information straight into the crapper.

When we talk about the potential dangers of two-way info exchange in online media, we usually mean the dangers for users — privacy, target marketing and so forth. But some of the biggest dangers could be for content providers. The more we learn about exactly how much and why you like us, the less excuse we’ll have to rely on our own judgment.

Online, as everywhere else, attention means money. TV producers and programmers have long relied on, and complained about, ratings services like the Nielsens, used to determine ad rates; and thanks to Internet metrics companies, new-media moguls can join in the proud tradition of href="http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/04/28/media_metrix/index.html">bitching about the numbers. But there are differences between online metrics and the quaint days of the volunteer consumer survey accompanied by a crisply pressed dollar bill. You can argue about the difference between Media Metrix’s reports (which interested parties like Salon charge underrepresent href="http://www.salon.com/media/col/poni/1999/04/08/media_poniewozik/index.html">at-work surfing) and Web sites’ internal numbers, and you can wonder whether Web companies are fudging their viewership numbers to make themselves look good, but one thing is true: New-media professionals, unlike their earlier counterparts, will have access to varied and micro-detailed numbers that will make yesterday’s demographic science look like phrenology. (More important, their advertisers will, too.)

In other words, modern technology has finally opened the ninth circle of writerly hell: knowing precisely, down to the last reader, how boring you are. Because Salon distributes an internal list of hit totals for every day’s articles, I have a fairly good sense of which pieces of mine will generate mad hits ( href="http://www.salon.com/media/col/poni/1999/04/14/dowd/index.html">breaking news, href="http://www.salon.com/media/poni/1998/12/22poni.html">politics, sex or, preferably, href="http://www.salon.com/news/1999/03/cov_04newsa.html">all three) and which won’t (esoteric subjects like fashion for the masses or, come to think of it, probably this one).