Congratulations! You Made This The Top-Rated NASCAR Blog

Things in life come and go, but sometimes it is nice to have people recognize time and effort spent for a single goal.

This is the Wednesday press release from the Sports Media Challenge folks who use their own search engine and software to track all kinds of sports blogs.

They were kind enough to rank The Daly Planet as the #1 NASCAR blog on their list.

As you know, the simple format of this site puts one or two issues into the spotlight every day that relate to either NASCAR TV or some aspect of the NASCAR media world.

While I get to pick the topics and write the actual columns, there is only one reason that the nice folks at SMC chose this blog. That is the extensive interaction and the intelligent thoughts provided by you.

Throughout the past year, NASCAR fans of all ages and with all different kinds of opinions have converged here to share their views. Many times, the topics of my columns have come from email sent by readers who feel strongly about an issue.

My opinion of the Internet is that this technology is best used to empower people. It works best when someone comes away from using their computer feeling a sense of community and self-worth. In today's world, sometimes both of those feelings are very hard to come by in real life.

I hope that over the past twelve months, whether you have chosen to comment or not, that you have come here simply to be a part of the sharing of information by people who like NASCAR racing as a sport.

My current goal is to continue to empower readers by adding a forum that will allow new topics to be posted and comments to be generated anytime by any user. We are also working on adding your own reviews of races and other NASCAR TV programming in both text and video form to begin user-generated full-length columns.

Without the help of a lot of people behind-the-scenes, none of this would be possible. Jay over at Jayski.com has been a steady hand and a good friend since the start of this project, and continues to refer readers of his site over to this little blog.

Thanks as well to the many journalists, TV types and network media relations folks who have quietly made sure I had the right information, and often made sure to point out when I did not. Thanks to the TV personalities who agreed to answer your questions during our series of off-season interviews.

Dave Moody at Sirius Speedway gave me an opportunity to appear regularly on his program, and the boys over at Rowdy.com let me talk TV on their iTunes Top 100 podcast. This season I will be returning to both.

Finally, I want to make clear once again that you are the reason this project survives. Without a strong community of dedicated readers, the issues that we brought-up to the NASCAR TV networks would not have resulted in the changes we have seen over the last several weeks. Simply put, your words got results.

As we officially open the NASCAR TV season on Thursday with Media Day at Daytona, we all know that soon we will be neck-deep in a slew of NASCAR TV programming that will run at a hectic pace all the way through November.

It is nice to be able to take a moment right now and look back at the incredible amount of opinion and information we created simply by working together. While some computer types may refer to it as "content," I prefer to call it "the real voice of the fans."

According to our friends at SMC, you have officially been heard. Congratulations.

The Daly Planet welcomes comments from readers. Simply click on the COMMENTS button below and follow the easy instructions. There is nothing to join and we do not want your email address. We simply want your opinion about the last twelve months of this Internet project.