What does it mean to be part of the Salon blog community?

Last week one of the two filchyboy blogs rocketed to the top of the Salon daily ranking charts with off-the-scale traffic numbers, even though an examination of the referrer logs showed nothing special going.
Andrew Bayer commented on this in his Dreaming of China blog, discerning that filchyboy had placed the Javascript code into the pages of his extremely popular safersex.org website, resulting in the sharp ramping up in his apparent traffic.
Andrew saw this as dirty pool, since those pages at safersex.org may or may not have been managed with Radio (the site is very highly ranked on the main Radio community server) but they did not seem to have anything to do with Salon.
I find this to be an interesting question, having just recently moved this site from the blogs.salon.com host to my own domain. In doing so, I did not in any sense mean to be seceding from the Salon blogs community (and a number of the other blogs here are self-hosted), so I didn’t see any reason to remove the web bug that counts up my page hits in the Salon rankings.
But there is a fine line. What is it about this blog that makes it a legitimate participant in this community? If it’s not being hosted on the blogs.salon.com server (that is, if I’m turning up my nose at the perceived prestige of a salon.com domain name, though in fact it’s more the impersonal usernum that turns me off) is it just a matter of using Radio and having purchased the version of it associated with Salon?
Some of my categories are now hosted at sites that have other content not managed by Radio. It would be “wrong” for me to implant the code on those other pages that would generate additional apparent hits in my count, right? I sense that this would be wrong, but it seems to be tied to what software I use with the blog.
What about my Blogger-based mirror of this site (http://memewatch.com/blogistan/relay/ is I think the address, or is it http://radiofreeblogistan/relay/ ? I’ll check)? It uses the Manila-Blogger bridge to generate its content (stripped of entry titles). Should I have the web bug on those pages so readers of the mirror are counted toward my total? I haven’t done so, but would it be unkosher of me to do that?
So, again, what is the essence of this community? What holds it together? What makes a web page or a web site a member or not a member of this community? I don’t see any easy answers.