Over the past few weeks I’ve been pretty busy with conferences and doing some computer programming, so my exploration of the social side of the Internet has been a bit lame. However, last night, I spent a little time exploring a few different developments in this area.

Alexa

This month, my Alexa ranking has been plummeting.

Alexa page rank, originally uploaded by Aldon.

This didn’t seem right, so I checked my monthly uniques on Quantcast. Quantcast bases its information based on a pixel embedded on the webpage and appears much more accurate. Sure enough, according to Quantcast, my traffic has been growing nicely this month, as I thought it was.

Quantcast Uniques, originally uploaded by Aldon.

This matches reports on my server logs as well as on Google Analytics. It appears as if Alexa is seriously broken yet again.

atniz suggests that it is because Alexa is somehow ignoring EntreCard traffic. On the other hand, What About Brazil is claiming their traffic, as measured by Alexa, as increased because of EntreCard and looking at their recent graph, it doesn’t look like EntreCard traffic is being somehow deducted from their counts.

Having done a lot of programming, and remembering the old adage, never attribute to malice what can better be attributed to stupidity, I doubt that Alexa is deliberately discounting traffic generated by a popular new advertising site online. If they are, they should probably remove traffic from DoubleClick and Google Adense as well. However, that would make their data completely worthless, and I doubt they want to do that.

EntreCard

On the other hand, they may be wanting to filter out EntreCard because the ads there do encourage people to click on the ads to receive EntreCard credits. EntreCard users that click on an ad receive a credit, as does the website that has the card clicked on. This has encouraged some people to create pages so that people can very quickly drop on a website and move on. It is called ‘quick-dropping’ and does nothing to increase readership of the website. I’ve been ambivalent to quick-dropping. I don’t do it. I want to read the sites I visit and I hope people read my site as well. Based on Google Analytics, it does seem like people spend a bit of time on my site, at least scanning what I have to say.

However, EntreCard is not ambivalent to quick-dropping. In a recent blog post there, they have announced that anyone who supports quick-dropping will be banned from EntreCard.

I think this is a good idea, but I hope they have a way of appealing if someone gets delisted incorrectly.

While we are on the topic of EntreCard, I thought I would check my internal logs to get a better sense of where the EntreCard traffic is coming from. 58% of my traffic is coming from people clicking on my card in their inbox. 25% is coming from ads. Another 6% is coming from the categories. Less than 1% comes from my details page. I don’t know where the remaining 10% comes from.

MyBlogLog

From EntreCard, I visited RockFuse which has an entry about MyBlogLog new ‘Connector’. What the connector does is it displays all of your contacts in MyBlogLog with a table showing which other services the contacts are using and if you are currently connected to them on that service. The services that they list are Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Pownce, Last.fm and digg. They have a nice link to bring up your friends pages in each of these systems so you can easily add them. So, if you are a contact of mine in MyBlogLog and you recently got several requests from me to be a friend on other systems, that is probably why.

Unfortunately, the connector page doesn’t properly show if you are connected to a person in the other systems. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it work with Twitter. However, since the connector is in beta and Twitter has enough problems as it is, it isn’t too surprising.

Linux Inside

As I followed the links and saw some of what my friends were doing, I found to other interesting sites. The first is Linux Inside. They have a tool for tracking traffic on Flickr pages. I set it up last night. As of this morning, there isn’t any data, but I expect it will produce an interesting graph in the days to come.

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retaggr

Retaggr is yet another site to create a badge providing information about you and links to all the different social networking sites you are part of. It is an impressive list of sites they support. Here is my tag right now:

Tumblr

Another person was making good use of Tumblr, so I’ve started tweaking my Tumblr page. It should be getting information from various sources, have the retaggr badge and be themed to look a little bit like this blog.

So, I’ve tweaked various sites, added friends, now I need to head off to some offline tasks, and then return to writing some computer programs.

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