The Blog 500 Challenge (prize: $50,000 in advertising or $10,000 in cash) I suspect that to come up with a comparable solution to existing big wig aggregators (such as Technorati) a non-affiliated programmer would have to come up with some pretty innovative solutions to determine the top 500 AND keep it updated AND keep it spam free AND make Jason and Bryan happy, all at the same time. Some trials and tribulations to remember: http://www.pubsub.com/linkranks.php – Failed in the first few weeks (or was it months) with large multi user blogs corrupting the results. Almost useless to determine an “A List” of 500 bloggers because sites like blogger.com dominate the linking war. http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/ – A list of “most linked in people” that is most widely used to determine popularity. Technorati actively filters out sites such as photomatt.net (which is twice as more linked in than Boing Boing) from its top […]