"How much is your blog worth?"

I first saw this graphic on My Left Wing--I'm sure many of you have seen it. It declares, "My blog is worth (dollar amount). How much is your blog worth?" Don't know how long ago it was that I first did this, but I clicked the link and entered the url for my Howard-Empowered People blog. The result was a badge declaring that my blog was worth $0, and below that the code was provided, so that I could proudly proclaim to the blogging world that my blog was worth $0. Now, why would I want to do that? (I did later discover the blog of an Episcopalian nun, who had done just that, and added the words "Says it all, doesn't it?" But she's apparently removed the badge since then--I haven't looked at that blog since the season of Advent.)

Well, I was curious about how a blog that had been around for some time could be deemed worth $0. It got a decent number of hits per day--more than any other blog I'd ever run--and a number of other blogs had linked to it. Of course, if I'd been *really* curious, I could have just clicked the link on that page to learn more. But it didn't matter that much, and I was working on other things.

Some time later, I was looking at one of those "How much is your blog worth?" banners again and noticed the "Powered by Technorati" button. Oh. I see.

I signed up for a Technorati account, and, while Howard-Empowered People is not valued anywhere in the same ballpark as the big blogs, the dollar amount is definitely no longer zero.

In the past couple weeks, there has been some discussion about the value of links, the cost of being dropped from the blogroll of one of the big blogs, and how mutual linking can be beneficial for bloggers. I've added one of those badges to this blog, mainly as a way of tracking the effect that links have on the dollar amount.