Alexa ranks can be fun. But can they ever be trusted?

What does a high Alexa rating mean to a web master? It shouldn’t mean that much as it’s not accurate. Alexa is a website that tracks a website’s traffic history, and gives a ranking based upon the number of visitors. However the fact that it requires a tool bar to work flaws it in many ways.

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Apparently the folks at Alexa have never heard of any other browser besides Internet Explorer and FireFox. This seems quite unprofessional coming from a company owned by Amazon.com.

My main site peaked at ~17,000^th for Alexa (with Netscraft rank currently at 18,608^th for schestowitz.com). In the latter case, however, the figures are grossly biased because I have the toolbar installed. Ranks very much depend on the audience the site attracts. System administrators , for example, fancy the Netscraft toolbar. Its primary service addresses a niche.

Alexa traffic ranks prove to be a real problem (as well as a perpetual pain) to Webmasters. This remains the only number which can conveniently be assigned to a Web site. It is a silly label that should be disregarded, but the average user does not know this. Luckily, not every average user will have such ranks displayed. Alexa as a comparator is a misleading assessor. Even top sites cannot be compared, unless one judges by orders of magnitude (and takes these with a grain of salt). In fact, PageRank and the likes of it weigh more factors other than traffic, so they ought to surpass Alexa in terms of validity.

As a timely rant, I was temporarily able to influence Alexa rank with a local installation of the A9 toolbar, but then Microsoft took over A9′s operations and forced them to shut down some competing services, the toolbar included. Yet another example of acquisitions or mergers that are practically death knells (and a penalty to Mac/Linux/BSD users in this case). That is just why I took it personally.

SearchStatus in action

Related item: Firefox Toolbars

HE way knowledge is shared among and between people keeps changing–or put positively–evolving . Take for example stories and personal journals that are released under a Creative Commons (e.g. Attrib-NonCommerical-No Derivs 2.5) license. These come to show that content becomes a very ‘fluid’ thing where information is increasingly reused to improve existing knowledgebases. But it goes beyond that.

Many people are openly sharing information about themselves. They make it searchable online. Keywords and unique identifiers definitely help as well. Indexing makes streams of written consciousness easier to locate. Passively perhaps, I am among people who can organise personal data owing to searching technologies in a vast pool of informational context–the World Wide Web. I did not choose the path of anonymity. It was either a wise or a dumb choice, depending on who’s to judge. By collecting and piecing together over 20,000 UseNet posts of mine (a screenshot of my newsreader is shown on the right hand side), one could reproduce some of my life’s history and, potentially, highlight more controversial opinions, too.

There are less flattering pieces of information of the Web, including the defamation of one’s name and dignity. Sadly, there are some people who take advantage of indexing. The best method of evading nasty consequences is never to engage in conversations with those who shoot from the lip. Hopefully it becomes reciprocal, as in “if you want to discard my messages, then just killfile me”. In other cases, however, the coronation of stupidity takes over logic. Sick-minded (and often anonymous) people carry on with inane one-liners and personal attacks. Yesterday I confroned a Digg stalker. Yes, there is some crazy stalker on Digg who is a sworn Microsoft fan that systematically mods my comments down.

All in all, despite a little bit of negative publicity, I am fairly pleased with what I have contributed over the Web. I guess that every valuable thing with a noble cause, however benign, must have a cost.

As a side note and an off-topic discussion, I recently began using Google Groups. The local newsgroups server has been problems-ridden for a week, so I haven’t much choice. Here’s an observation: in Google Groups’ beta, I am rather surprised to find that Google makes ad revenue out of UseNet. It even appends “Copyright 2006 Google” to pages although the content is in fact contributed by various people without any connection to Google. A well-deserved reward for their service (UseNet gateway)? Probably. But the mind still boggles.

Personally, I only keep copies of messages and threads in which I am involved, whereas Google does this at a far larger scale. It also digs archives that are published without people’s awareness and consent. This leaves a few fuming non-anonymised posters from the nineties and eighties. One of them, for example, has demonstrated loudly and caused disruption to the Webmasters newsgroup. Constant harassment and floods carries on for a few months before cessation. My feelings remain mixed as far as Google’s involvement in public forums is concerned.

The CNN ran an article on some mind-boggling research. It addresses the obsession with capturing memories digitally. These things are, in my opinion, close to being pointless because too much information can/must be captured, e.g. sound, video, 3-D models, etc. The list is endless and the information cannot be conveyed and processed by one’s mind unless one lives in the past and reminisces in ‘slow motion’. I suppose it would be a nice way of remembering vacations, but for an indexable mind and knowledgebase, it’s just too big a task.

This particular research project is backed and run by Microsoft. If it ever becomes a reality, let us hope they will be careful with names. Zune is pronounced the same way as “a shag” in Hebrew (yes, the bad meaning; very vulgar) while Vista, at least in Malta, appears to mean “a whore” (or something along these lines, if I recall correctly).

Worth reading: an unrelated article with a Mac-slant, which discusses expansion through bundling of software.

According to an article that I recently read, the Internet could one day be broken down into separate networks that are isolated and selectively dispersed around the world. This means that the global nature of the Web, as well as the wealth of information, would cease to exist. Moreover, this heralds that final goodbye to a state where little or no censorship barriers can prevail. This changes one’s perspective entirely.

This worrisome move is entirely different from the issue of Net neutrality, which in itself separates the Web into multiple tiers. It is also reminiscent of rumours about ‘Googlenet’, where one submits a site to a dark privatised Web that gets indexed and closely monitored (obviating the need to crawl remote servers and use pings for distant notification).

In the long term, whether this is totally disastrous or not remains to be seen. Consider, for instance, the peculiar extension of resources that are made publicly available. Let’s look a look at the way that the Web has evolved in recent years. Only a tiny crosssection of the ‘visible’ Web involves content spammers (or scrapers), where visibility is grossly defined by search engines (internal sites and intranets aside). However, in reality, the content that exists on the Web–that which is deliverable and which is spam–can actually be a majority (spammers spawn colossal colonies of junk and dummy content). This leads to (or involves) blogalanches, ‘poisoning’ of the index/cache, and it’s subverting search results in the process. All this leads to chaos as search engines diverge from the correct search results and deliver something less meaningful. In the process of struggling for good spots (or visibility) in search engines, spam rises and leads to attacks of various sort. Temptation leads to vandalism, which leads to further maintenance. The Web no longer seems like an appealing place to be. But can division of the Web help? I very much doubt it. It’s all about authorities controlling information. Brainwash is the means for making others think alike, comply, and even be submissive.

OMPUTER skills and competence with them is a subjective thing. It very much depends on the area of expertise which is judged, as well as the way it is judged (e.g. average level of skill versus number of gurus). Regardless, I have found the following study rather interesting.

In some areas, such as security and Windows desktop administration, the United States remained dominant, the study showed; in others, such as LAN/WAN communications, we’re facing stiff competition from newcomers Romania and Ukraine. India continued to dominate database development and most programming-language categories — except C#. Latin American countries didn’t crack the top 10 but showed strong growth in new certifications, with Cuba up 125 percent, Chile up 163 percent, and Mexico up 73 percent…

In a survey conducted last year, Holland was shown to be the most tech-savvy country in the world. Whether that holds under the conditions imposed above, who knows…?

HE KDE project celebrated its 10^th anniversary last night. The wonderful work done by its contributers and volunteers has greatly enriched my life in the past few years, so I would really like to thank them.

Productivity-wise, KDE appears to be best bar none. As one example of its cutting-edge features, KDE offers tabbed shells and file managers. It has incorporated this functionality for several years. These increase productivity and should become popular for the same reason that Midnight Commander became popular many years ago (and continues to be used by a visible minority of users).

At times I was pondering a move from SUSE to the more brittle Kubuntu. SUSE is becoming more GNOME-inclined while package management over at the Canonical/Ubuntu camp seems tempting. In any event, my experience with GNOME was a satisfactory one, but long-time dependence on advanced KDE features could not be ignored. KDE has that special touch and it is trivial to use once familiarity is gained.

There has been a great deal of talk about browser statistics recently. Market share has become a measure of diversity, which ensures that Web developers tailor their site according to standards rather than for one particular application. Security remains at the heart of this debate, but it’s clear that the complexity of this problem is high.

All Web browsers are insecure to some degree, because they all must work with flawed code in the operating systems. There are some indications of progress, such as frequent patches from Microsoft and Mozilla to close security holes. Still, these actions may be too little too late if a zero-day exploit is the attack weapon.

It all comes down to patching speed, then number of flaws, as well as their severity (e.g. privilege escalation can be catastrophic).

Related article from the same day (and same Web site):

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