Not that long ago, Indiana political blog Taking Down Words discovered a calculator that determined how much your blog is worth. In the comments section, folks checked out some other blogs and discovered that The Bilerico Project is the 2nd highest-valued Indiana-based blog at $167,668.38. (Shakespeare's Sister ranks higher.) But, damn, $170k? That's almost $4300 per contributor!

But imagine my joy at finding this site that ranks blogs according to their authority on the web. They use sites like Technorati and Alexa to determine your status, but also figure in social networking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Bloglines to see how many folks are really reading and talking about your blog. In other words, it's great to have a zillion readers, but if they don't link to your site or talk about it on their own blogs, what good is it? Out of over 170 million blogs in the world, the site ranks The Bilerico Project as #6272. I took a screenshot of the results and compared us to several LGBT and political blogs - both nationally and locally. Of the blogs I checked, only Daily Kos (#162), AmericaBlog (#3665), and Towleroad (#4571) ranked higher than we did.

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While I knew we had a great site, it's nice to see such a strong confirmation. So keep sharing the Project on the social networking sites! (You can find them on each entries main page - middle column. Just click the "Share" link under any post on the front page to get there.) We appreciate the linkety love, your comments on our posts, and the time you spend on our site. As our traffic keeps building, let's keep up the work of building the Project into the community we want to participate in. After all, without you - we're nothing.

Thanks everyone for helping us succeed!