How do you measure the status of the internet?

I've seen a few different websites report on the 'status' of the internet, I'm just curious what measures, metrics and tools people use.

There is a few websites which publish packet loss and latency such as:
http://www.internetpulse.net/
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/

While people I hear go running for BGP update statistics.

So which methods do you use to measure the weather on the internet?

The Internet is always broken in some way or another. There's no meaningful way to summarize its health in general terms. About the only metric that matters is whether or not you have adequate two-way communications with the endpoints you need to reach.

So, I use munin to ping a couple places every ~5 minutes, and that works for me for overall trending. If I notice I can't reach something in specific, out comes the mtr, and only then do I fire up the BGP looking glass.

In short, there's not a problem unless there's a problem, at which point there is a problem.