As I surf around the blogs, one question that I often stumble across is, how much is your blog really worth. One site looks at the number of incoming links as reported on Technorati and then calculates the value based the value that AOL paid for Weblogs. Based on this, my blog is worth nearly $75,000.

Yet this is a gross over simplification. If all of the links are from my 100 closest friends and all they do is link amongst themselves, that is worth much less than if the links are from the top 100 websites. In theory, this is part of what Google’s PageRank tries to address.

Yet the number of links to a site might not be the best indication of blog value. Another way people think about value of their blog is the number of readers. Yet this number might be misleading as well. Looking at my raw logs, I get around 4000 hits a day on my site, from around 1200 different IP addresses. Over the past 4 months, I’ve had around 400,000 visits from over 60,000 unique sites. However, this includes webcrawlers, spambots, and who knows what else. Filtering out this, the traffic, a more realistic number is probably around 1400 real hits a day. On the other hand, that doesn’t include people who read the site from my RSS feed.

Of course, if you are looking at pay per view advertising, no one wants to use your internal numbers, everyone wants to count by themselves, and these counters can be all over the place. Counters use small images which might not get displayed, javascript that might not get executed, and so on. I’ve tried various sitecounters and usually turn them off when I find that there is no correlation between internal logs, and different external sitecounters. In addition, I’ve found that the sitecounters often slow down my site.

The latest sitecounter that I’ve started playing with is Quantcast. It looks like they may provide some interest data, for sites with enough traffic.

Yet even traffic count may not be the best way to judge a website’s traffic. What is more interesting is the amount of influence a site has. If Keith Olberman or Anderson Cooper talks about your website on the air, even if no one comes to visit the site as a result of the mention, the site is probably more influential than if the only person talking about the website is your mother and a couple siblings. However, most of us don’t get our site mentioned by celebrities, so this is not an easy metric to analyze.

That said, the other day, I got an email from a PR flack trying to get me to write about his client. I asked why anyone reading my blog would be interested in hearing about the flack’s client, and the only response was that the client as ‘entertaining’. While I know that a lot people are interested entertainment in blogs, it isn’t particularly my style. Yet it did indicate that at least one PR flack out there seems to think my blog is influential.

Even more important might be the impact that a blog has. Blog Catalog is asking bloggers to use their blogs to bring attention to Donors Choose, a nonprofit raising money for public school classrooms around the country. Here is the BlogCatalog Challenge Link.

Closer to home, I receive an email from my friend Lynne. She is participating “Bennett Cancer Center Hope In Motion annual Walk, Run and Ride event on June 3rd” and has an online fundraising page up here. Please, stop by and add your contribution.

Beyond that, the other day, I wrote about links from people I ran into at Personal Democracy Forum. These included Change.org and PledgeBank. After I wrote that, I received an email from Robert Tolmach about ChangingThePresent.org. All of these sites are similar to OurVoicesTogether, which Kim used to find my Christmas Present last year.

So, let us take a few moments, and think not about how many links, or readers, or influential readers or whatever we have as a means of finding value for our blogs, and instead do what we can to help people around us.