Yes, we know Alexa isn’t accurate, in fact it has a number of blindspots, but it’s a easily accessed public web metric. But for checking out the Web2.0-ness of your site, you might like to check out URLFan.com.

What is URLFan?

If you’re a “Web2.0-ish” person, you’d want to check out this metric type site which ranks sites according to their RSS feeds.

The site description says URLFan is “currently parsing hundreds of gigabytes of RSS content a day”

As of my last visit, URLFan’s stats stand at “Reading 746,006 feeds, parsing 41,334,923 posts, ranking 1,844,043 domains”

Bear in mind that the criterion for ranking is popularity of web feeds. As you know, RSS (really simple syndication) is becoming more widely adopted as the distribution technology of choice for content syndication, whether it’s into your Google Reader (or it’s equivalent at your My Yahoo! page) or the Mozilla Thunderbird email/RSS client.

Out of curiosity, I pulled the top ranked sites according to URLFan:

With content sites, not surprisingly, dominating the top positions.

Interestingly, YouTube and Flickr, rank highly despite the fact that the bulk of their content is video and graphic-based. I suspect it has to do with the content’s title and tags.

The lesson here is if you’re not already tagging your content, you should start today!

I thought it’d be interesting to see how bloggers ranked, so I (more…)

• web analytics
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Lee Odden interviewed MyBlogLog CEO Scott Rafer and got some insights into the blossoming social community site. From the looks of things, there are certainly some interesting developments in store for the young blogging community site.

To date MyBlogLog clocks in at about 50,000 users, fairly impressive considering the fact that it launched in Mar 2005. And with the recent acquisition by Yahoo! it looks set to grow from strength-to-strength (Especially with a 2% daily growth rate).

From my personal observation, MyBlogLog users tend to be fairly active, especially since the service combines the best features of blogging and social community sites.

As Scott observes, the MyBlogLog widget (typically displayed in the right sidebar of most blogs) certainly proved to be its secret weapon.With blogs already being very social-oriented, the widget only helped accelerate the pace of the service’s “virality”.

It’ll be interesting to see (more…)

• social traffic
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I was a little upset with affiliate network Clickbank yesterday.

For one, I knew a transaction had been processed, but it hadn’t appeared in my sales screen.

I checked with the content publisher and they confirmed it appeared on their screen.

So why hadn’t it appeared on my screen?

I got my answer this morning (and the sale appeared too).

(more…)

• affiliate marketing
• 4 Comments