Compete - The New Alexa?
February 4, 2008 | 2 Comments
I have to say the site name “Compete” is far more engaging and obvious as a name… As an admitted Alexa-holic, a new site that compares sites is exciting to me. It is very similar to Alexa, though they claim better data sources.
Tags: alexa, compete, metrics, site stats, statistics, traffic
No Sheep: Traffic Milestone 5M
March 25, 2007 | 2 Comments
This Friday No Sheep broke the milestone of 5,000,000 reads tracked with BSuite! This is an achievement far exceeding my expectations when I first launched this blog.
On November 10th, 2004 NoSheep was launched. Initially the site ran on Geek Log, but my passion for this platform was lack luster. Between November and February I posted a mere 9 articles before stopping. It wasn’t until June of 2005 when I converted to WordPress that I became excited and passionate about my site.
Since then I have had the pleasure of seeing my readership grow substantially. Currently FeedBurner has tracked a high point of 435 feed subscribers in a single day. In the last month I have consistently enjoyed an Alexa rank in the top 100,000. Additionally my Technorati rank has hovered at under 60,000.
Thanks to all the readers, commenters, and contributors!
Tags: alexa, bsuite, feedburner, no sheep, nosheep, technorati
Great Stats
March 23, 2006 | 1 Comment
It turns out I love stats. I’m sometimes amazed at how many different statistics I poke at on a regular basis.
Inside of Wordpress I use the phenomenal bsuite. Basically this keeps track of my individual story reads, incoming search terms, as well as tagging my posts and building related story references at the bottom of each post. If you run Wordpress, get bsuite, it rules.
There are more general web like stats that are often needed. For example, user browser, screen resolution, country of origin, time of day traffic, broken links, adword conversion, etc. These things are all handled superbly by Google Analytics.
Sometimes however, I want to compare my overall stance with other blogs on the net. For this I (like most) turn to Technorati. They do a great job of ranking known blogs on the internet both in general and based on certain tags or keywords. It’s good to know where you stand, but even better to have others to compare against.
Finally, my favorite site of all: Alexa. Alexa is an Amazon property which ranks the top few million websites. For the top 100,000, they provide detailed traffic analysis and graphs. While working for a major internet company, I became very familiar with Alexa as a daily tool to measure our success against our competition. Especially in internet advertising, traffic is important.
Ken recently pointed me at Pub Sub as another site to check out stats on my blog, but overall I find many of the numbers here questionable. Compare some blogs you are familiar with and I think you’ll see my complaints clearly.
If anyone has any other great stats packages or web services they know and follow, let me know. I’m always looking to feed this strange addiction.
Tags: advertising, adwords, alexa, blog, blogging, bsuite, google, google analytics, internet advertising, plugin, plugins, pubsub, statistics, technorati, web, web development, web statistics, wordpress
Alexaholic
March 14, 2006 | 2 Comments
Hi. My name is Zach and I’m an Alexaholic.
Now there is a solution for me, and all the happy Alexaholics just like me. This great site has made it even easier to follow your website or your competitors. Or, maybe you just like to follow the popularity of some of your favorite (or most hated) sites.
Tags: alexa, internet, web, web development, website
Alexadex
February 2, 2006 | 1 Comment
Alexadex is like a stock exchange for web sites. You start off with $10,000 to play with and you can buy shares of any website that is ranked by Alexa. The price you pay per share is based on reach. This is built using the Alexa API or AWIS.
Some examples:
DirectTrack.com - $565/share (bought 16 shares)
Maisonbisson.com - $70/share
Plymouth.edu - $50/share
SpiralBound.net - $4/share (bought 183 shares)
NoSheep.net - $2/share (bought 114 shares)
Yahoo - $288,000/share
OK, so my choices were based on friends and not any real strategy, but oh well, maybe I’ll get lucky.
Tags: alexa, alexa api, alexadex, api, awis, Fun Whatnot, game, games, stock exchange, web, web sites
NY Times Steps Back 5 Years
September 20, 2005 | 15 Comments
You have to wonder what the guys at NY Times are thinking. They just announced a new service called
I’m planning on keeping an eye on their Alexa rank after they put this in place. I bet within a few months a significnat decline in traffic becomes apparent.
In a lot of ways I think this is sad, NY Times is fairly well known for its left slant which I’m not exactly opposed to…
Tags: advertising, alexa, blog, blogging, blogs, new york, newpaper, NY Times, NYTimes, onlne newspaper, The New York Times, timeselect, TimesSelect, traffic, traffic rank
The Greatest Keyboard Ever
July 25, 2005 | 2 Comments
Art Lebedev Studios is currently showing off the Optimus Keyboard which is still in the initial stages of development. This is undeniably the greatest keyboard ever created. On each key are OLEDs giving it ability to have dynamic images. Imagine the possibilities! Dynamic buttons for various games, or programs. I’d love to look down at the keyboard and see that I accidentally left the caps lock key on. I want one, I wish they were available now…
Previously I was in love with the ZBoard which has exchangeable keysets. The downfall of this is that you have to buy separate keysets for each application/use/game you want to use with it. This could become expensive quickly. Additionally it is far less versatile than the Optimus keyboard.
I found this on Alexa because the site is currently enjoying a 50,000% increase in traffic! I think that is entirely related to it being Slashdot’ed.
More Info:
Engadget
Primo Tech
Gadgetopis
Ensellitas
TechSpot
Tags: alexa, gadget, hardware, innovation, keyboard, OLED, optimus keyboard, technology, zboard