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Tim Stay, who writes for Know More Media at Call Center Script, offered a wise comment yesterday regarding methods of calculating the worth of a blog (or blog network). He pointed out that the “How much is your blog worth?” applet is unreliable as an indicator of a blog’s worth in dollars.

Tim, you’re right.  In my post about the blog value calculation applet yesterday, I placed "worth" in quotation marks on purpose, since I also consider the "how much is your blog worth" applet to be good only for entertainment purposes.

What the Web needs is …Tim Stay, who writes for Know More Media at Call Center Script, offered a wise comment yesterday regarding methods of calculating the worth of a blog (or blog network). He pointed out that the “How much is your blog worth?” applet is unreliable as an indicator of a blog’s worth in dollars.

Tim, you’re right.  In my post about the blog value calculation applet yesterday, I placed "worth" in quotation marks on purpose, since I also consider the "how much is your blog worth" applet to be good only for entertainment purposes.

What the Web needs is a reliable way to gauge the relative importance or value of a given blog - or, as I’ve written, of a blog network. Which is more important - the number of inbound links, the number of trackbacks, the amount of time visitors spend at a blog network, etc.? I welcome anyone’s thoughts.

My question for Matt and others who catalog blog networks is, "How can you really measure the worth of a blog network?"  Kudos to those who try - and to the rest of us, I highly recommend Tim’s advice: ultimately, "a property is worth what someone is willing to pay for it and what someone is willing to sell it for."

In the meantime, Matt, I suggest that you place a disclaimer to the effect that the "worth" calculator may be quite inaccurate and should not be used for anything other than entertainment, or as food for thought. For example, it estimates the value of Technorati’s official blog at $0.00.  I’m not saying that it’s a bad tool; after all, it has generated a lot of buzz and hopefully encouraged new ideas about how and why we ought to compare blogs to one another.  I’m happy thankful (it’s Thanksgiving) that efforts are being made to track these things.

So … what do you think? How should the monetary worth of a blog network be calculated? How useful is Dane Carlson’s “How much is your blog worth” applet? How many roads must a blog network walk down before you can call it a valuable blog network?  I invite your opinions.

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