Hold the Alexa, here comes URLFan
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…)