Dissent the Blog is—influential? Guess so!

.....

.....Dissent the Blog is listed on BlogNetNews/California.
.....To be honest, I don’t quite know what BlogNetNews (BNN) is. I know that it lists recent posts by a set of political blogs. It does appear that all of the major state political blogs can be found on BNN.
.....I vaguely remember reading about this thing when it started up about three years ago. “Sounds good,” I said. I joined it. I told Rebel Girl. She said, “Huh? What are you talking about?”
.....“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe it will help readership.”
.....But here’s the thing. According to BNN, Dissent the Blog is (right now) the seventeenth most “influential” political blog in California. That’s what it says on this page, and that page looks pretty dang authoritative.
.....And what (you ask) is “influence”? BNN explains:

BlogNetNews' Blogosphere Influence Rating combines a variety of data sets to determine which blogs are most powerfully influencing the direction of the California political blogosphere. The exact method BNN uses to calculate influence scores must remain proprietary in order to prevent attempts to game the system. BNN's methodology takes into account the fact that all Internet data is profoundly limited in its reliability by using multiple data sets that, when combined, reveal a fair picture of activity in the blogosphere.

.....See what I mean? Data sets. Proprietary. Gosh.
.....I did some looking, and it appears that we’ve been in the top twenty for two or three months. At one point, we were #12.
.....What does it all mean?
.....Dunno.
.....Rebel Girl just called me. She said:
....."That's great about our being #17. But there's something even better!"
....."What's that?"
....."We beat out those bozos over at Red County (OC). They're only #20!"