Brief notes
1. What do you do when your helicopter breaks down in Snowdonia? Call in the RAF to airlift it back to base for repairs. I think this qualifies as “amazing footage of the week”.
2. Congratulations to Lewis Hamilton for winning the British GP this weekend; he’s now back in the running for the championship. Commiserations to David Coulthard for crashing out early in his last ever home race. And well done (!) to Bernie for finally doing what he’s been trying to do for years and taking the GP away from Silverstone. Given that one of his objections has always been the lack of facilities at Silverstone, I’m not sure how he thinks that Donnington is a suitable replacement, when it needs even more work than Silverstone.
I don’t know who it is at the BRDC that Bernie doesn’t like, but there’s obviously someone! Or perhaps it’s just that the BRDC told him where he could stick his outrageous demands for money. The sooner that the premier class of motorsport is not controlled by such a devious, manipulative and two-faced person as Bernie Ecclestone, the better that it will be. Between him and Max “not a Nazi, but definitely the son of a fascist” Moseley, the sport long ago descending into farce and it needs to be stopped.
3. You’ve probably seen much talk of this around the Net over the last few days, but in case you missed it a judge in the US has ruled that Google must hand over a log that contains details of the videos that You Tube users have watched. The log, which “contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details” has to be handed over to Viacom in an argument over copyright infringement.
Quite rightly, privacy groups are up in arms that this information is to be handed over, as it contains data that could allow individuals to be identified and is a massive breach of privacy. But what worries me, additionally, is why this information is being kept in the first place. Yes, I can understand you want to know which videos are popular, etc, but why do you need to keep personal information? Isn’t it enough to know that a video has been watched 100,000 times? Why do you need to know which 100,000 people watched it?
There has been some speculation that Viacom may use this information in an attempt to prosecute individual users, so I’d recommend that if you’re a You Tube user you only watch non-copyright infringing clips from now on.
4. In a related issue, Virgin Media is warning file-sharers that they risk being taken to court if they illegally download music. It’s part of a BPI initiative to stop the illegal downloading of music by making the ISP’s responsible for it. Years ago we had “Home taping is killing music (and it’s illegal)” stickers on LPs and cassettes; now we have its online equivalent. But the “Home taping” campaign back then was based on a fallacy, and it’s the same today; music was never at risk. What was at risk was the strangle hold that the music industry had on it, while they milked it for every penny they could. They can’t (and never have been able to) move with the times and want to protect a profit margin that really doesn’t belong to them anymore. If it was all about protecting the artists, as people like the BPI would have us believe, I could give it more support but it isn’t; it’s all about record label profits.
If I download an album through iTunes or any of the other online music stores, rather than buying the CD, why should I have to pay the same price as the CD? There’s no physical product that has to be manufactured and shipped to a retail outlet, after all, and my consumer experience is reduced because there’s no cover artwork or inlay card, etc and no handy CD to enable me to take my music on the road with me. Why, then, was my recent purchase of Melody Gardot’s Worrisome Heart only £0.30 more for the CD than it would have been for a download version? (And, in fact, at the moment it’s actually cheaper for the CD!)
The music industry needs to wake up to reality and rather than going after people who illegally download music, they should be making it much easier to download music legally. Which must also include getting rid of DRM completely, and making artist’s back catalogue’s more readily available.
So how relevant is Alexa?
I’m using Flock as my browser at the moment; I moved over to it from Safari because the Mac browser wasn’t good at certain things - like the visual editor at Wordpress. There were also a number of other things that appealed about Flock:
- It’s based on the Mozilla engine, so pretty much anything that’s available for Firefox should work.
- It integrates with things like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr; all sites that you can’t live without.
- You can get the Alexa toolbar for it.
I’ve become rather obsessed with the Alexa toolbar, with Alexa rankings and with web stats in general. During the course of normal life, I’m responsible for quite a number of websites, whether here at home or at work. All of them are tracked by at least one stats package, sometimes more, whether it be Google Analytics, Sitemeter or Web Analyzer. Web stats seem to be the modern equivalent of alchemy, with all of the fantastic information that they can gather for you - even though most web stats are only inferred from certain hard data that is collected.
The one that confuses me, though, is Alexa. For instance, yesterday the Alexa ranking for The Wolf’s Howl @ BlogSpot was 9,246,837. Today, it’s 4,182,604. But what does that mean? I know the Alexa figures take a three month look at the site, so it hasn’t all happened overnight, but how good or bad is 4,182,604? It would seem to be obvious that there are 4,182,603 sites that have better rankings than me, but out of how many? If Alex indexes ten million sites, my ranking is just outside the top 40%. If Alexa indexes 100 million sites, it’s just inside the top 5%. I can see how far from the top number I am, but how far away am I in percentage terms?
And, as I understand it, Alexa only gathers information from people - like me - who have the Alexa Toolbar loaded (which is only available for certain browsers). So how much of the Internet browsing fraternity contributes to an Alexa ranking? I don’t know anyone else who has the Alexa Toolbar loaded - just like I don’t know anyone who’s got the Google Toolbar loaded (which is apparently used to determine Google PageRank). So, have they got their toolbar in 5% of browsers? 10%? 95%?
Without these two fairly important pieces of information, it’s impossible to put a relevance to an Alexa ranking. That being the case, why is Alexa given so much importance for rating the success of a site? Companies looking to place advertising on websites seem to look at two things - Google PageRank and Alexa Rank. Both are a complete mystery to how relevant they are, but the world seems to revolve around them.
So can anyone out there answer my two questions; how many sites do Alexa index and what percentage of total Internet users have their toolbar loaded?
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
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