Well, we are less than 24 hours from crossing the finish line on Indiana's Favorite Blog. The question is, was it worth doing? Emotionally speaking, yes. Getting a ton of Hoosier blogs some attention was a great thing.

Like everything else on the web, you can't put a lot of stock in emotions, so you look to analytics to get the hard answers. Channeling my best Richard Dawson imitation:

Yahoo Analytics Says:

Contest Generated: 5,124 visits - 17,216 page views
The Normal Level of Traffic: 1002 visits - 3,254 page views

Contest Generated: 980 Registrations in October
The Normal Average for registrations: 38 Registrations per month

Percentage of our traffic that exited to a blog in the contest: 26.3%

In short, the contest generated over five times the usual traffic, over a quarter of the traffic visited a contestant blog. Not bad for a few hours of work and dealing with a couple of grumpy emails and phone calls from knuckleheads who don't realize that an essential ingredient in any blog is an audience. Yes, Robby and Kyle, I'm thinking about posting some of the better pieces of "fan mail."