Charles, that's pretty close to what I'm seeking, although a "Wilbur the Flatworm" ecosystem has a better acronym.

As far as whether my priorities are out-of-sync with TTLB's, I really wouldn't know (despite what I might have written; I'm not responsible for that, of course) as, last time I checked, I had no priorities.

I have found the TTLB Ecosystem to be inaccurate in tracking my inbound/outbound links.

Hardly anything seems 100-percent accurate, but this is true of almost everything on the Net.

Woaaah...what's this inaccurate on the internet thing you speak of?

Is it wrong/vain to want to measure the success of one's blog in relation to other blogs? And, other than TTLB, how would one do that?

There are other ranking systems. You might try signing up for BlogStreet, which rates, as of two minutes ago, 101,613 blogs. Still, this is only a fraction of the number out there; nobody has everything, not even Technorati, which claims to follow nine million.

But really, except for the top 20 or so, there's not much difference. It's the navel-gazing nature of the blogosphere, readers don't care about traffic or rankings, only other bloggers, but why? I know a well-traffick'd blogger who's always crowing when Reynolds links him & bitching when his traffic is down, but more or less traffic doesn't get you anywhere. The TTLB rankings in particular a just a game about how many blogrolls you're on.

As are most such things, and so is the Blogshares game, which calculates values based on linkage.

In TTLB specifically, I've never, so far as I know, made it more than halfway up the Large Mammal group; I try to avoid checking more than once a month.

If I carried ads, I'd probably be more concerned about traffic, but right now I'm just surprised anyone reads this stuff.

As the Onlie Begetter of the ETF Ecosystem, here's my rationale.

I used TTLB for a bit, and like some of the commenters crept up,and then sort of stuck. Then I found myself doing things just to creep a bit higher. Which meant posting things I wouldn't normally bother with. Which I don't enjoy.

So I decided on values-based categorization - if you're a Spiny, your a Spiny, whether you get a gazillion hits or none. And I can apply it to blog topics - moving the WaPo to from Kierkegaard to Dinsdale status for example.

And of course Spiny is a true Epic Figure.

Work in progress.