Speaking of iRank, I actually read the paper closely, as opposed to most folks in the blogosphere. Many (or at least the ones I could find) drew their conclusions based upon the Wired News article. A fine piece, but it misses the true import of iRank.
A component of iRank is based upon how a weblog behaves over time. A literal reading of PageRank depends only upon what a site explicitly is, e.g. content and links. In iRank, behavior is used to generate implicit links between weblogs. Implicit links between posts, pages, and sites will be the next wave of crawling, indexing, searching. They're more adaptive and harder to spam.
Besides, it gives all of those machine learning folks something to do.
I don't know if it will lead to a more "egalitarian" blogosphere, but there can be as many implicit measures as opinions, and ergo, many more ranking systems.