Back in June, BetUS.com came up with a great idea – Put Your Money Where Your Blog Is in which people were able to place bets on who they thought would end the year at the top of Technorati’s Top 100 List. This was a brilliant peice of viral marketing that resulted in a lot of buzz and a lot of really good links. The beauty of this went beyond the links because it got a lot of new people to sign up and bet on something that they could relate to. It went beyond link bait for the sake of links.

When this contest started:

Technorati.com (a blog search engine) says that there are over 37.3 million blogs in the blog universe (or blogosphere as it’s collectively known as).

Currently they are tracking over 63.2 million blogs.

Here were the original odds:

A bet on Matt Cutts would have won you $600 on a $100 wager. Unfortunately for you (and Matt) – you would have lost (unless Matt gives away the secrets to Google’s algorithm between now and Sunday causing thousands of webmasters around the globe start linking to it) since he won’t even be in the Top 100 when 2007 arrives. So who is in the running? At this point it is basically between Engadget and BoingBoing (with engadget holding a very comfortable lead).

Here’s the current top 5:

So if you put a sizeable bet on BoingBoing now would be the time to start spamming blogs to get thousands of quick links counting your losses because it looks like Engadget has this one in the bag.

I will update this post once the winner is announced – BTW BetUS wouldn’t let me place a bet on this today – I even tried calling

Update : As expected – Engadget won handily…

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