My traffic ranking has jumped from 672,477 to 640,528 in ONE
DAY...LOL...
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?u...roductions.net

Must be teh Wedding Blog site I guess, seems like every time I make a
new site my traffic ranking shoots up through the roof.

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog


Hatter Quotes
-------------
"I'm not a professional, I'm an artist."

"The more I learn the more I'm killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity
of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it's merely a social construct
that doesn't really exist outside of your ability to convince others
of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won't jump the gun and start
creamin yer panties before it's time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that
they're just born with a soul. *snicker*...yeah, like they're just
givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling...everywhere.
So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest,
to their merry little mess."

"There's a difference between 'bad' and 'so earth shatteringly
horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip
their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand
sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible
images burned into their tiny little minds'."

"How sad that you're such a poor judge of style that you can't even
properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You're sure? Awww,
gee...that's too bad...for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:

Good work.

D

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 02:47:39 GMT, Drew wrote:

Eh? I make that a net *drop* of 31,949 ;-)

Adam.

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 15:22:28 +1200, Adam <anon@nowhere.com> wrote:

A lower number means higher popularity...meaning a rise in traffic to
my sites/server. Here's a link to the top 500:
http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500

As expected, Google is right at the top.

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog


Hatter Quotes
-------------
"I'm not a professional, I'm an artist."

"The more I learn the more I'm killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity
of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it's merely a social construct
that doesn't really exist outside of your ability to convince others
of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won't jump the gun and start
creamin yer panties before it's time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that
they're just born with a soul. *snicker*...yeah, like they're just
givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling...everywhere.
So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest,
to their merry little mess."

"There's a difference between 'bad' and 'so earth shatteringly
horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip
their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand
sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible
images burned into their tiny little minds'."

"How sad that you're such a poor judge of style that you can't even
properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You're sure? Awww,
gee...that's too bad...for YOU!" `, )

Onideus Mad Hatter wrote:
Are you talking about Alexa traffic rankings? If so, then yeah, I tend
to notice that additions/modifications to a site often make short-term
swings that are sometimes pretty significant.

For instance, my DVD site (www.dvddude.net) is currently sitting at a
relatively poor (149,513) three month average for what it usually
ranks, but today's rank is 72,300. I attribute the overall low average
to this being a fairly slow time for new DVD releases -- I'll get some
drastic swings again probably after I get my Kong review posted, along
with reviews of a stack of other titles I have sitting around my desk.
I'm also starting a new promotion on the site with USA Network, so I
imagine the cross-linking will really jump my ratings.

But in some ways, Alexa has some odd quirks. I've found that rank
spikes don't really coincide with traffic spikes (Alexa seems to lag
several days behind). Also, Alexa is way off regarding the sites that
link back to mine. The rankings are also only reliable for original
domains -- such as yours and mine. There's another DVD site out there
that is actually part of the Tripod network -- like
"dvdonline.tripod.com" or some such thing -- and it has an insane
ranking of 142, but that's because Alexa is including ALL of Tripod in
that.

One thing that does really annoy me about Alexa, however, is that their
reporting systems are often flagged by AdAware and the like, so most
people wind up uninstalling it (whether intentionally or not). This,
in itself, is no big deal -- except that there are a lot of companies
that rely on Alexa data for determining ad rates and so forth. So on
the one hand, companies are relying on Alexa demographics, but on the
other, people are being told Alexa is spyware. : \

-- Robert

On Wed, 22 Mar 2006 19:52:29 -0800, fsdstudio wrote:

Because it is. It's a stealth cookie created as permanently as possible
with a unique ID accessible by a whole host of companies.

It's exactly the same as having a barcode or RFID tag on your back that
shops secretly scan as you browse through the high-street, all without
your knowledge and/or express consent.

--
Ben Measures
$email =~ s/is@silly/@/

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:30:15 GMT, Ben Measures
<saint_abroadis@sillyhotmail.com> wrote:

....yeah, but is that REALLY private information? I mean, where you go
in public and what you buy in public is...well, public. So why would
it be an issue if someone is keeping track of it? It's like closed
circuit TV, as long as it's not filming inside your house (and window
blinds solve that problem easily enough) I don't see where the fire is
at. A video camera on a public street corner isn't any different from
a police officer standing there watching you...or anyone else standing
there watching you for that matter...it's out in public.

To a certain degree you cannot have complete privacy whilst living in
a social environment. The only way you can ever TRULY have absolute
privacy is if yer living out on the mountain somewhere where there
aren't any people. It's a give and take thing.

--

Onideus Mad Hatter
mhm ¹ x ¹
http://www.backwater-productions.net
http://www.backwater-productions.net/hatter-blog


Hatter Quotes
-------------
"I'm not a professional, I'm an artist."

"The more I learn the more I'm killing my idols."

"Is it wrong to incur and then use the hate ridden, vengeful stupidity
of complete strangers in random Usenet froups to further my art?"

"Freedom is only a concept, like race it's merely a social construct
that doesn't really exist outside of your ability to convince others
of its relevancy."

"Next time slow up a lil, then maybe you won't jump the gun and start
creamin yer panties before it's time to pop the champagne proper."

"Reality is directly proportionate to how creative you are."

"People are pretty fucking high on themselves if they think that
they're just born with a soul. *snicker*...yeah, like they're just
givin em out for free."

"Quible, quible said the Hare. Quite a lot of quibling...everywhere.
So the Hare took a long stare and decided at best, to leave the rest,
to their merry little mess."

"There's a difference between 'bad' and 'so earth shatteringly
horrible it makes the angels scream in terror as they violently rip
their heads off, their blood spraying into the faces of a thousand
sweet innocent horrified children, who will forever have the terrible
images burned into their tiny little minds'."

"How sad that you're such a poor judge of style that you can't even
properly gauge the artistic worth of your own efforts."

"Those who record history are those who control history."

"Is my .sig delimiter broken? Really? You're sure? Awww,
gee...that's too bad...for YOU!" `, )

Adam wrote:

It would be, if the numbers were referring to _visitors_ or _hits_. Mad
Hatter was referring to his ranking, meaning he's now in the top
650,000 on Alexa.com's list of most visited websites (that also have
Alexa.com's statistics counter on their websites).

--
Kim André Akerø
- kimandre@NOSPAMbetadome.com
(remove NOSPAM to contact me directly)

"Kim André Akerø" <kimandre@NOSPAMbetadome.com> wrote

Am I understanding what this stat is? Is it a ranking of sites by the number
of vistors with the Alexa toolbar, among only the sites that have Alexa's
counter on them?

How does this translate to number of unique visitors and number of unique
page hits. That is, for Robert to rank at 150,000th, how many unique vistors
per month does he get? How many unique page hits from them does he get? What
percent of each of those would be Alexa toolbar users? Is that percentage
consistent among all sites or does it vary by site. What percentage of web
sites overall that have the Alexa counter on them?

Just trying to translate the numbers being thrown around into something
meaningful overall. Is there a more meaningful way to translate this number
which would allow comparisons across sites that don't use the counter in
terms of total unique vistors and unique page hits?

Fred Doyle

In article <882522dtn2tbb3p5tm1isk2vffmpugiq0v@4ax.com>, Onideus Mad
Hatter <usenet@backwater-productions.net> wrote:

Absolutely true . . . we're in the middle of a big controversy here
because the city/county wants to put in video cameras to discourage
Spring Breakers from doing some of their obnoxious (not all of them,
but enough) crap.

It's become divided into a "party" issue - the Reps in favor of and the
Libs against. We've already had Libs threaten to call in the ACLU over
it (invasion of privacy) while the average citizen (not including
tourists/Spring Breakers) thinnk it's a good idea.

Personally, I figure if you're in public, you're in full view of others
(some of whom, esp with the video camera industry the way it is now,
may be filming you). I figure "what's the difference?" If you
re doing something stupid or funny but not a crime, the people who are
more likely to use that "against" you are the common citizen with their
HandyCam (America's Funniest??).

I don't think it's too far of a stretch to act in public like you
*were* being recorded . . . you're certainly being mental recorded
here (such a small town - you can't fart without someone guessing what
you had for dinner). So if you don't fix wedgies, pick your nose or
otherwise act the ass in public, you have nothing to worry about.

Also, a problem that we've had with the SB - just FYI, is public sex
after hours in front of bars, strip clubs and the like. The majority of
the locals are wet blankets and are mad about it . . .

--
C Pierce

While the city slept, Connie Pierce (info@pierceillus.com) feverishly
typed...

That's very inconsiderate... you'd think they'd at least go round the *back*
of the building! ;-)

Cheers,
Nige

--
Nigel Moss http://www.nigenet.org.uk
Mail address will bounce. nigel@DOG.nigenet.org.uk | Take the DOG. out!
"Your mother ate my dog!", "Not all of him!"

In article <4422e75d$0$14760$892e7fe2@authen.yellow.readfreen ews.net>,
nice.guy.nige <nigel_moss@deadspam.com> wrote:

Ugh . . apparently you've never seen Girls Gone Wild. They used to
tape here ALL the time during Spring Break. Finally, about two or three
years ago, our own Chief McKeithen (of the Martin Anderson's death in
the Bay County Boot Camp fame) raided what's-his-face's plane and
arrested them ALL (it's still being dragged out in the courts here). He
confiscated their jets, their limos, their helicopter . . . you name
it. All because McKeithen told him to get out and not tape here anymore
and the guy refused to.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news03/gone_wild.html

I'm actually pretty disgusted . . . we have no state taxes because of
tourism - we depend on it, really. And the gov here is trying to move
out the strip clubs, adult bookstores, and nightclubs trying to have a
more "family" appearance. But each Spring, they beg these kids to come
down here (not a "family" environment when it's SB) and suck up to MTv
something awful. Seems to me that they appreciate the money, but not
the people . . . They want it both ways, it seems.

In any case, my sweet lil small town has been in the news something
awful here lately. . . and for nothing that we should be proud of.

--
C Pierce

In article <4422e75d$0$14760$892e7fe2@authen.yellow.readfreen ews.net>,
nice.guy.nige <nigel_moss@deadspam.com> wrote:

Oh, forgot to mention that about 2 months after we moved here, we saw a
couple doing "it" in front of the grocery store in broad daylight. They
were in their car, though, not on the street . . .

It was a 40-50ish couple and neither one in very good shape . . .
EWWWWW!

--
C Pierce

Connie, sorry for indirectly replying with your post but I've somehow
killfiled Hatter's posts . Your reply suggests it holds a commonly held
viewpoint so I'll address it (just this once).

On Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:41:07 -0600, Connie Pierce wrote:

Because there are no controls as to who that 'someone' is. I wouldn't mind
if a responsible agent of the law were watching over me but there are no
guarantees that the person tracing you is a law agent, nor responsible.

If a stranger were to physically follow you around town you'd
understandably be a little worried. Just because you now can't see (or
know about) the stranger tracing your movements shouldn't mean it's any
less threatening, unless you believe in the power of burying your head in
the sand.

--
Ben Measures
$email =~ s/is@silly/@/

Fred Doyle wrote:

In essence, Alexa tries to work like Nielsen ratings -- in that it
tries to sample web traffic trends and then extrapolate a bigger
picture. The site rank is based upon a couple of different factors.
The first is reach, calculated per million -- or, out of a million
Internet surfers, how many of those are visting a site in question.
The second factor is how many pages on a site the typical surfer views
before leaving.

In theory, Alexa's approach would be far more meaningful in terms of
advertising than the traditional means of basing ad rates on raw
traffic data. The flaw with most Internet advertising is that it is
slaved to unique impressions. But if you think about it, unique
impressions are next to worthless. As designers/marketers/advertisers,
it's hammered into our heads over and over that showing an ad to a ton
of people once is never better than showing the same ad to a small
group many times. Yet, banner advertising ignores this principle,
which is why they have to get more and more pervasive and annoying in
an attempt to attract attention.

Alexa is an attempt to set aside unique impressions (which only tell
the picture of that specific site), and instead draw a picture of the
true popularity of sites as compared to other sites on the 'net.

The problem though, as I stated before, is that now Alexa gets flagged
as spyware and often gets deleted, which in my mind, calls into
question the legitimacy of some of its results. The spyware thing
serves to filter out "average" users from the Alexa database as they're
the ones most likely to panic when it turns up in a spyware scan and
delete it.

For the record, however, Alexa itself isn't specifically installing
"spyware." Rather, it is simply piggy-backing onto features that are
already a part of Internet Explorer. Yes, Alexa collects data on what
sites someone with the toolbar installed surfs to. Is that enough to
classify it as spyware? Some people think so. Can Alexa be trusted?
That, I don't know -- but Alexa is an Amazon.com company, so I imagine
they can be trusted as much as Amazon can, for whatever that's worth.

-- Robert

Connie Pierce wrote:


Was flour involved?

Just curious.

D

With neither quill nor qualm, Connie Pierce quothed:

Bullshit. The naivety of that opinion will not do your progeny (-if
any) any good at all.

Well that's no surprise. Republicans are always in favor of "family
values". <derisive laugh>

Oops, hold on there. You are assuming that today's "average citizen"
_can_ think in the first place. There has been some question regarding
this in recent times, particularly after they re-elected Bush.

Would there be any difference if _every cubic inch_ of so-called "public
space" was video-recorded 24/7?

That isn't the idea. The real goal is for people to act decently.

The real problems you have are your politicians and non-partisan
delusions.

--
Neredbojias
Contrary to popular belief, it is believable.

Ben Measures on 23/03/2006 8:51 pm wrote:

"responsible agent of the law" isn't that a bit of a contradiction in terms?
[sorry, that was enjoyable sarcasm].

I used to sometimes follow strangers around in town, simply as a form of
amateur performance art. I wasn't interested in them at all I was interested
in where I ended up; I was interested in the journey they unwittingly took
me on - like being told a story with a surprise ending. It was fun but I
haven't done that in years... thanks for reminding me. I think, now that
I've got so much time on my hands, I'll revisit that pleasant pastime.

First of all, thanks for thi info. It was very helpful

<fsdstudio@gmail.com> wrote

Ok, got it....but...Neilsen ratings are based on a scientifically determined
sample group that tries to cover all demographic groups in proportion to
their representation in the overall population of viewrers of the medium so
that the extrapolation is based on some pretty solid statistical principles.
I'm not sure how well that would hold if the sample is from a group that is
skewed by its use of the Alexa toolbar. It might be just fine if the sample
size is large enough.

Actually, that is pretty much how all advertising pricing is determined, by
the number of potential impressions based on circulation, viewership,
listeners, etc. so that is not uniique to the Internet.

True, single, unique, one-time impressions are next to worthless in terms of
advertising. With most media, the assumption is that average size of
audience over a period is correlated to number of return viewers, creating
multiple impressions. If there are 10 million people viewing a tv show per
week over a 3 month period, it is assumed that they are not 10 million
different viewers each week. (They actually have statistical formulas that
help project the number of one-time vs. return viewers of TV shows based on
ratings) I guess what I don't understand in your explanation is, if ranking
is based on reach per million of surfers, and number of pages per viewer
session, how does that correlate to multiple impressions, unless the same
banner is on multiple pages. It is not measuring return viewers, is it?
Return viewers generate second and third impressions.

How? That is the piece I am missing in your description of rankings.

I'm also a little confused by someone's statement that Alexa only ranks
sites with "Alexa.com's statistics counter on their websites." Is that true?
I do a lot of work on a website that is huge. I've had a lot of input into
the visual design of that site. The site ranks at about 12,000th, but I
don't believe we put ever Alexa's statistic counters on the web, but I can
find out pretty easily if we did.

Thanks again for the information

--
Fred Doyle

In article <LeDUf.80797$no3.70297@tornado.southeast.rr.com> , Drew
<whoisthatmaskedman@hotmail.com> wrote:

No, but they were (apparently) VERY limber. It took place in the back
seat of a midsize (I think it was a Taurus).

I honestly had to stop and look for the camera (Candid Camera, meaning)
.. . . once I realized that it wasn't a joke, I got the hell out of
there!!

Horrible flashbacks . . .

--
C Pierce