What is PeekScore?: PeekScore is a rank from 1 to 10, assigned to every person. The higher someone’s score, the “more important” they are on the web. In calculating your PeekScore and updating it often, PeekYou takes into account your known presence and activity on the Internet, including but not limited to; your blogging, participation in social networks, the number of your friends, followers, or readers, the amount of web content you create, and your prominence in the news.

As is made evident by a scan through any edition of Tom Cunningham’s weekly Tweets of the Week feature on UFC.com, the gentle, poetic brutes of MMA (or, Mixed Martial Arts) have plenty to say in 140 characters or less. Their various whereabouts, and their thoughts and musings on any number of subjects are all well documented on websites, blogs, Facebooks, and MySpaces, scattered across the ether, and their gratitude to their fans is perpetually being expressed in nearly real time. Simply, MMA is a sport where the athletes are incredibly active online, where the sport’s rapid ascent in popularity is clearly partially attributable to the accessibility of its fighters (both online and off), and where – among its athletes – a large digital footprint is the norm.

So, in keeping with all of the above, today’s PeekScore list is a bit more of comparing apples to apples than some prior lists have been. We took ten eleven names we know to be (or at least to be among) the MMA related folks who are most active online, and set about seeing how they compare to one another in the PeekScore department. Not too many surprises below, but MMA fans being the impassioned bunch they are, we’d not be shocked if many among them would disagree.

Do these rankings surprise you? Who did we forget? Who else should we have included? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you. (SOME ADDITIONAL COMMENTARY CAN BE FOUND AFTER YOU READ THE LIST, PLEASE KEEP SCROLLING.)

Rank	Picture	Name	Bio	PeekScore
1		Chuck Liddell	Now retired, this UFC Hall of Famer recently appeared on Dancing with the Stars.	9.04 / 10
2		Quinton Jackson	Rampage Jackson is a former UFC Light-Heavyweight title holder, and one of the stars of that A-Team movie which came out a year, or so, ago.	9.03 / 10
3		Forrest Griffin	Forrest is a former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion.	9.01 / 10
4		Randy Couture	Now retired from MMA, Couture is a three-time former UFC Heavyweight, and two-time former UFC Light-Heavyweight champion.	9.00 / 10
5		Vitor Belfort	Vitor is a former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion.	9.00/ 10
6		Jon Bones Jones	Jon Bones Jones is the current UFC Light-Heavyweight Champion.	8.93 / 10
7		BJ Penn	Penn was the first non-Brazilian winner of the World Jiu-Jitsu Championship in the black-belt category, as well as a former UFC Lightweight Champion and UFC Welterweight Champion.	8.80 / 10
8		Georges St-Pierre	St-Pierre is the current UFC Welterweight Champion.	8.03 / 10
9		Anderson Silva	Silva is the current UFC Middleweight Champion.	7.24 / 10
10		Tito Ortiz	Along with Couture and Liddell, Ortiz is one of the sport’s earliest stars. A former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion, he is now the CEO of the Punishment Athletics MMA equipment and clothing line.	6.89 / 10
11		Jason Miller	Added to this list by special request (see the comments): The flamboyant “Mayhem” Miller is the host of MTV’s Bully Beatdown.	6.34 / 10

And now, briefly, some additional commentary…

Whatever your opinion of what it may say of our species, it is all the same a fact that for millennia now, many of we humans have enjoyed dedicating a portion of our leisure time to the observing of humans other than ourselves beating the living tar out of one another (you know, for fun). Sometimes the violence is but a bloody, bone-snapping facet of a greater competition of field acquisition or goal achievement – a means to an end, as it were – but other times the violence is essentially the sport in question in total (where breaking a fellow’s nose clear off his face will be, in and of itself, cause for huzzahs). The PeekScore blog is not here today to exhort, one way or another, regarding the morality or sanity of this irrefutable truth, but – unburdened with an opinion on the activities themselves – simply to be in a very real way inspired by this unseemly reality of the human condition.

For some decades, until recent years, here in our western culture we masses had satisfied our thirst for witnessing the pounding of flesh by flesh via “the sweet science.” Or boxing, if you prefer. Over the past twenty years, or so, it seems that those who may have had a gift for boxing have instead pursued other interests, as the quality of competition is just simply not what it once was, and – even beyond the degree to which the quality of the boxing itself has waned – the game has come to be viewed by most as just too crooked and unreliable, and too influenced by factors which have nothing to do with what happens in the ring. The rankings – and the processes by which it’s decided who even gets a shot at a title – just don’t seem fair or logical, and for many the sport hardly seems worth becoming invested in emotionally any longer. It doesn’t reward talent first and foremost, and (if it ever did) hasn’t for a very long while.

Whatever the reasons for it, boxing has all but entirely faded from favor over the past twenty years, and for a time during its protracted vanishing from relevance, many peaceniks and hippies were heard to bang their tambourines and stomp their dusty Birkenstocks in celebration. These hapless, well-meaning pacifists assumed that it was mankind’s having evolved beyond a hunger for an old fashioned toe-to-toe gladitorial fracas which had rendered the sport unthinkable in our progressed civilization. Their utopian vision of the arenas – once packed to the rafters in the name of mankind’s regrettable lust for violence – now filled with an unshowered populace grooving to hacky sack competitions and ten day jam band festivals, from which everyone would essentially emerge victorious, was not, however, to come to pass. As boxing receded from public interest a new sport, frankly twice as brutal, began to emerge. A bloodsport once – fairly or not – marginalized as a street-brawling freakshow, decried by prominent politicians, and even for a spell outlawed in 36 states, began to refine and civilize its rules from its “no holds barred” beginnings, more greatly emphasize its technical aspects, and become the style of MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) which has in recent years conquered arena box offices throughout the land, and become nothing short of a sensation on cable television, and of course the internet. Boxing, if anything, was rendered irrelevant not only for its not being honest or good enough, but also for its not being sufficiently ferocious.

Part of MMA’s success has been attributable (beyond the desire on makind’s part to witness stomach-churning violence in a controlled setting) to the accessibility of MMA’s fighters, both via public appearances and on the internet. It is no coincidence that MMA’s recent, rapid ascent in popularity has corresponded with social media’s rise to ubiquity. Like the purveyors of other formerly niche – and now mainstream – concerns before them, both the promoters and fighters of MMA have masterfully utilized the internet to find the audience who would most be interested in what they have to offer. The individual fighters have been able to establish and control their own backstories, bios, and public personae, and really build the sport as one first and foremost driven by personalities, and one where fans will become personally invested in their favorite fighters as people, and not merely as athletes.

For some entertainments, the internet is an afterthought, or one small aspect of a far-reaching media plan. But for those on the outskirts with a product, service, show, or contest which could appeal to the many, but of which no mainstream sponsor or media outlet would automatically want a part, the internet has proved to be a boon like no other in history. For all the jokes made above regarding the sport’s brutality, the truth is that MMA is one of the most honest, technically skilled, and profound competitions you’re going to find, and the athletes within it some of the most impressive, intelligent, and driven existing in any sport. If you can handle seeing men get kicked in the face, like, a lot, then – if you’ve not already done so – maybe you should check it out. You might be in for a surprise (not the “men getting kicked in the face” part, though; that WILL happen, and now that we’ve told you, it won’t be a surprise).