The New Wolfs Howl

Brief notes

By Wolfie | May 9, 2008

1 First and foremost, congratulations to Eastbourne Borough FC who were superbly victorious in their play-off final last night. We’re moving up into the Blue Square Premier League next season; national football for the first time in the club’s history. The guys done good!

If you saw the match on Setanta and wonder who the hell Health Plus are, they’re the company I work for who have been sponsoring Borough this season. We’ve also been helping them out with various supplements which coach Nick Greenwood has said have had a positive effect on the results this season. It’s nice to make a difference!

2 More stories to make your blood boil in the news today. The teenage killers of Kodjo Yenga have been given ‘life’ sentences and the judge has recommended they serve at least 15 years. So that means they’ll be out when they are in their late 20’s, early 30’s. Hardly life is it? Lock the door and throw away the fucking key. In these days of being too pussy to have a death sentence, life should fucking well mean life!

3 Apparently the latest edition of the Rough Guide that deals with England is coming in for a bit of stick, because it describes us as “overweight, alcopop-swilling, sex- and celebrity-obsessed TV addicts”. Seems fairly accurate to me.

4 Wikipedia, and the parent company Wikimedia, are coming in for a bit of stick, too at the moment because of various comments made by their second-in-command. I haven’t really been following the story but from what I’ve seen it seems like the “pedia” in their name might have a totally different meaning from now on. (Also here and here) (Thanks to Calacanis for bringing this one to the Wolfs attention).

Categories: Blogging | 1 Comment »
Tags: Brief, Notes

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Confused about Alexa

By Wolfie | May 8, 2008

I’ve never really understood why Alexa rankings are used as a guide to how popular a website is. As they themselves say that their data “may not be a representative sample of the global Internet population. To the extent that our sample of users differs from the set of all Internet users, our traffic estimates may over- or under-estimate the actual traffic to any particular site.” Yet everyone wants a really high Alexa rank.

Recently, Alexa changed the way that they gather data and arrive at the rank for a website. It used to be that you had to have the Alexa toolbar loaded for your visit to a site to count. But the ranks that were arrived at gave no indication of how many people were using the toolbar (as a percentage of total internet users) and gave no indication of how many sites were indexed - you might be ranked 544,232, but how do you know how good that is? If they only index 544,233 sites then it’s really bad. If, though, they index 54,423,200 then it’s pretty good. Relevance is what we’re talking about.

And that was a system that could be “gamed” quite effectively. I’ve got the Alexa toolbar loaded in Flock (it’s not available for Safari) and have managed to dramatically improve the Alexa ranking for all the sites that I maintain at home and at work just from my own visits. Being able to improve a site’s ranking by over 2,000,000 in less than 10 days from one person’s visits seems like there’s something wrong.

With the changes, though, they use the toolbar data backed up with “data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.” Helpfully, they don’t give an indication of what those sources are. This should mean that Alexa rankings will be more accurate and more relevant, but I’m not sure that it does. The changes were made in mid-April (see this blog entry from the Alexa site), and immediately a lot of people were upset because their ranking got worse (see comments to the same blog post). The rank for this site improved by about 50,000 at that time, but since then hasn’t changed at all. Given that its been about three weeks, that seems odd (the old ranking system used to change the ranks every three or four days).

What’s also odd is that the current rank doesn’t seem to tie-up with Alexa’s own figures. On the traffic details page for wolfshowl.com, they state that all but 0.4% of the traffic comes from UK, US, Australia, Canada or Indoensia. The individual ranks for these countries range from 20,306 for the UK to 224,386 for the US - yet the overall rank for the site is 364,952. How does that work? If it’s done on averages, then the ranking in the 0.4% that comes from other countries must be really, really bad because the average of the countries they list is 140,002. Whichever way it’s done, how can a site have a ranking 120,000 worse than the result you get if you add together the ranks of the two countries that make up over 86% of the total traffic?

I’ve always wondered about the relevance of Alexa and lamented it’ use a measure for advertising spend, but now I’m also starting to wonder about its ability to add up.

Categories: Blogging, Internet | No Comments »
Tags: Alexa, Relevance

Bass-ackwards once again

By Wolfie | May 3, 2008

The BBC is a good source for all sorts of news - including the stuff that really makes my blood boil. This latest story deals with a statement from the National Association of Head Teachers, calling for good parents to be rewarded for looking after their children properly.

Sorry? You want to reward people for doing what they’re supposed to be doing anyway? You want to make it seem like it’s something special to look after your children properly? If it really is, if the standard is for people NOT to look after their children properly then as a society we’re fucked. Pure and simple.

In a similar vein, there’s this story about a planned 38% pay increase for prisoners that was pulled at the last minute. 38% pay rise for prisoners? Come ON! You’re kidding right? They’re PRISONERS! They BROKE THE LAW! Why are they being paid for the work they do? Isn’t it supposed to be part of their punishment? It’s apparently all part of the rehabilitation programme. Here’s an idea - instead of making prison so damn cushy, why not actually make it a proper penalty - so that people would far rather NOT commit a crime because they don’t want to be put in jail?

Categories: Life, Rant-O-Meter | No Comments »
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Facebook again

By Wolfie | May 3, 2008

The BBC have discovered that it’s easy to write a Facebook application that will, when loaded on a users profile, harvest all sorts of information about that person and their contacts. If the BBC are the first people to think of doing this, I would be really surprised, yet there seems to be a level of indignation that I find hard to take. This is the internet; it is not anywhere near as secure as people would like us to believe and hacking goes on. If you don’t want anyone to find out enough information about you to commit identity fraud, don’t put it on a public forum - it’s as simple as that.

Until we all learn that our personal data is valuable - and that protecting it is OUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY - then identity theft will continue to increase.

Categories: Internet, Rant-O-Meter | No Comments »
Tags: Data, Facebook, Security

Protected: Like I said, nice idea

By Wolfie | April 30, 2008

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Tags: Review

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