What's a little traffic inflation amongst friends? When you are in the news and advertising business it's a big deal. In fact, as Conrad M. Black and the Chicago Sun-Times can tell you it can also be a very expensive deal as well.

I ran across an item over at ValleyWag.com that discussed the traffic statistics of The Drudge Report and compared them to other popular news outlets such as The Washington Post and Reuters.

It appears that Matt Drudge is artificially inflating his traffic statistics by using a small bit of HTML, specifically this piece of HTML: META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="175".