Status Statistics or Static?
April 4th, 2006 9:12:15 pm pst by 
Sterling Camden
Seems like every other day a new free tool hits the stage to help you determine your rank in the Web Kingdom. The latest, ://URLFAN (thanks Randy Charles Morin) ranks sites based on the number of links found in thousands of RSS feeds (285,050 as of this writing). They don’t say how they picked which feeds to count. Perhaps they’re scanning all they can find. This domain (chipstips.com) isn’t ranked yet, although they did detect one link (thank you TDavid).
In The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem, TDavid’s link promoted me overnight from an Insignificant Microbe to a Multicellular Microorganism. Thanks for the mitosis action, TDavid!
Alexa ranked me at web site #1,757,183. I don’t know out of how many that is, but I hope it’s a lot.
Another one I’ve been compulsively watching is BlogInfluence. This one rates blogs using a complex algorithm that includes the number of blogs, posts, and sites that link to your blog, as well as the number of people who subscribe to your blog in Bloglines, along with your Google page rank. I was elated to see that my score is currently 154.7, until I realized that the usual scale approximates neither a percentage nor a quarterback rating. Scoble ranks at 534447.7, and since my influence was 0 about a month ago, that means I should catch up to Robert in about 41,456 years.
Actually, the good news is that the number is growing, consistently. That lends support to a notion that TDavid has expressed before, that the way to succeed in blogging is just to keep on blogging. Apparently it still is an expanding system, and a big part of success will be to just keep on showing up.
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Our group that is currently exploring Second Life and blogging about it (our VTOR blog started the last week in January ‘06) is facing this same starting out fresh situation. We’re up to over 50 uniques a day now per third party stats which is a long, long way from our other websites but it is more evidence that people can still start a new blog in 2006 and build and build their traffic and readersip if the content is worthwhile.
Keep slugging, Sterling and when you become a rock star blogger don’t forget your friendly roadies
Hey TDavid, thanks for reading and for the encouraging word. And don’t be shy about linking to your sites in my comments (I owe you a lot of link-love, but that also goes for all readers/commenters). Hope all goes well for your new Virtual to Reality blog.
TDavid makes me feel better about my Alexa number being in the millions.
I think you called it when you wrote “compulsively watching”…there’s something compelling about watching your numbers (no matter the ranking system) trend upward, and inordinately disturbing about watching them descend.
With respect to Alexa, once one realizes/discovers that one’s own Alexa toolbar and a few (hundred) page loads weekly greatly influence one’s own Alexa ranking…well
…let’s just say that a psych lab rat pressing the pellet bar in a Skinner Box shows more presence of mind than many folks.
So in the case of Alexa, self-selection is the good and the bad news…
Heh, thanks for the comment, ARLAN.
That’s the main reason why I pay little attention to the Alexa rating any more. It’s so gamed.
And my compulsion for numbers in general has waned somewhat. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet.
[...] course I easily got caught up in the statistics long before they were significant (as if they are now). But I got over that — at least, [...]