ChrisMerriman.com

I probably won’t be posting anything for a little while, so please do feel free to get around to looking at some of the older posts here, or maybe checking out some of the static pages linked to at the top.
Anyway, just wanted to leave a quick message so people didn’t think I’d just given up on blogging or something.

As you may remember from my last mention of Bloggerwave, they were a little behind in keeping up with their payments. They managed to pay $60 of the $70 that was owed. As the other $10 is from late last year, and I’ve not received any response from them at all, I’ll not be holding my breath.

However, moving onto new issues, bloggers who visit the Bloggerwave site in a FireFox browser will find they are unable to select and therefore copy the image url required for each task. You can either switch to Internet Explorer, or save the page, and open it up in Dreamweaver/FrontPage/Notepad to extract the requried information. A more fundamental error in their system however is found when new bloggers register with their system. When you try to accept a new task, the screen you are taken to does not display any information at all. IF you already have previous tasks completed in their system, this problem does not arise, however as all new members will obviously not have any tasks already in the system, you hit a brick wall. I’ve sent the company another message (after testing the issue with a friend who had just signed up), but their past history of communications makes me believe that the best I can hope for is for the issue to be silently fixed at some point.

Last night a friend was asking me the difference between a site’s Alexa rank, and its Izea Realrank, if it has one.
I decided to create a quick post in the hope that it will help others.
First, lets go through the basics…
Alexa rank has been around a long time, and is supposed to give an indication of how popular (in terms of unique visitors, measuring one visit per day per IP) globally, compared to others.
How are these visitors recorded? Well if the page contains an image looking something like this…

… then each and every visitor is counted. If the image, or one similar to it is not present, then only visitors with either the Alexa toolbar, or a toolbar with the Alexa code in it, are counted. In either case each visitor is only counted once per day, to prevent unscrupulous webmasters from simply refreshing their own sites all day long. (That isn’t to say there aren’t other ways of gaming the system.)

So, onto Izea’s Realrank… This system is a little different, in that it doesn’t just include raw unique visitors per day. Within the equation for calculating a given sites rank, the pageviews and inbound links that are actually used to arrive at the site. The data is gathered by a snippet of code being inserted into the template for each page of a blog.

Because of the difference between the way the two ranks are calculated, it is entirely possible for two different sites ranks to go in opposite directions within a given time period. For example, below we have a graph representing ChrisMerriman.com’s RealRank, followed by a another graph showing laaneworld.com’s. The third graph is just one combining the two sets of data.

Below we have the same site’s (in the same order – ChrisMerriman.com first, then laaneworld.com)Alexa rank over time. As you can see, the trends are not necessarily transferred from one rank to another…