You didn't say much about contest indexes or aggregators? In my research sponsors always want to know how much traffic you have and how many incoming links? they also want detailed reports showing all manner of data.
I'm launching a local photo contest website in Toronto this summer. To help promote the site, I made a deal with the webmaster behind All Canada Contests and he agreed to share traffic with me if I put his index on my blog roll.
So its as easy as that. All you have to do is ask in most cases and you should build a network of these people until you can prove one thousand visits a day

How accurate do you think that movie 'the day the world changed' is?

You should do a blog post on how the fresh water ice caps screw up the salt level of the ocean and why that matters - not much on that subject.