So, what's your blog worth?

It's the slow period before the draft when teams go quiet to hide their intent. I don't expect to see big NFL news until draft day, or just before the draft. Time to muse.

For serious football bloggers, this is a difficult time. You work to build a following. You blog frequently because readers demand new content. My Running Redskins readers spend two minutes or less per visit. Story frequency keeps them coming back. So it hurts when teams aren't generating news for bloggers to over-analyze. Curse you, off-season.

So, what's the value of a blog anyway, especially when it's non-commercial? It turns out that people who think about those things value web logs on the basis of links. The more others link to you, the more valuable your blog. Technorati calls it "authority," and they use it to rank search results. Call it the "50 million monkeys can't be wrong" theory. If a lot of people link to a post, then that post must be relevant to the topic. Relevance gets you promoted to the top of the search list.

Other thinkers put a theoretical value on a blog based on the number and value of incoming links, whose value is similarly assigned by the value their incoming links. That adds a financial element to the evaluation. Your blog is more valuable when high value blogs link to you. (That's a lot of computing power by somebody to track all that.)

There are a couple of sites that figure this out for you. At Dane Carlson's Business Opportunities Weblog, you put in the URL for a blog and it will calculate its theoretical worth based on the link-to-value ratio underlying the 2005 AOL-WeblogsInc deal. According to them, Running Redskins is worth $7339.02. I think of myself as small, but influential.

The more engaging way is to go to Blogshares and search your blog. Better yet, join the Blogshares marketplace and play the game. With a little time and practice, you can become a high stakes market manipulator of the blogosphere.

Blogshares is a hypothetical stock market that treats blogs as businesses, post as products, and use incoming and outgoing links to calculate intrinsic value. But, in the game, you (anyone) buy and sell shares in the blogs. The frequency of buy-sell activity affect market price, and your portfolio value. The supply-demand feature is where the fun happens. On Blogshares, Running Redskins is valued at $4462.78, with a share price of $122.15. (Blogshares says I'm over valued. Hurmph!). Blogshares always under counts the number of links on Running Redskins. I suppose that affects value.

Fortunately, I get to buy and sell other blogs and invest in commodities. My Blogshares net worth is B$60,683,388.65. That's all funny money, I hasten to add. Serious players get into tools that allow market manipulation and hostile takeovers. I'm not a serious player, but have been hostilely bought out of blogs at outrageous profit. That's all funny money, too.

Fellow bloggers should know this is all a game. Nothing about Blogshares affects real ownership of blogs. Owners can claim their blog in Blogshares by registering and placing some HTML code on their site. That adds the Blogshares badge to their site so Blogshares' spider will recognize the claim.

No more time for this. I'm going over to Blogshares and buy controlling interests in Hogs Haven and DC Sports Kid, while waiting for football news.