I've found that Alexa/etc. aren't particularly good at baseline data, but they do work fairly well for inter-site comparison. -Fred On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Sarah Robbins wrote:

The important thing to remember about Alexa is that it works a bit like Nielson. It only tracks visits to a website from people who have the Alexa plugin on their browser. I think that makes it a bit skewed but many people still cite it.

-- Fred Stutzman 919-260-8508 ibiblio.org/fred fred@metalab.unc.edu Co-Founder and Developer, ClaimID.com Ph.D. Student, Teaching and Research Fellow, SILS UNC-Chapel Hill

You have to be careful with pagerank, unless you have access to the raw results, because google customizes results based on acct and even domain. On Feb 5, 2008, at 8:52 AM, Ismael Peña-López wrote:

Hi

I have personally used Google PageRank as a proxy for popularity. In my opinion, it is more inclusive - in the sense that Sarah pointed - than Alexa.

On the other hand, PR is not an absolute ranking, so you'll need something more to compare two sites with same PR.

Ismael Peña-López ICTlogy.net

Public Policies for Development and ICT4D School of Law and Political Science Open University of Catalonia

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I'd say that Alexa's good for comparing Web sites on a relative basis, but that it's not good for hard numbers. Also, as others have mentioned, their methodology allows for some questioning. According to comScore, which includes a Community/Religion category in their Key Measures report, the top 10 religion sites in December 2007 were * Beliefnet Network * Salem Web Network * CHRISTIANBOOK.COM * About.com Religion * LDS.ORG * THEINTERVIEWWITHGOD.COM * CHRISTIANITYTODAY.COM * CHRISTIANET.COM * CSMONITOR.COM * GOSPELCOM.NET That list includes many non-community sites, so I'd consider it an OK approach to looking at religion-oriented publishers online. Turning to Nielsen//NetRatings, AdRelevance doesn't offer a similar "genre," but you could check individual sites' ad impressions. Both services are quite expensive and outside the budgets of most individuals -- and they raise their own methodology questions -- but they're where I'd turn for data. Heath On Feb 5, 2008 10:05 AM, Eric Goldman <egoldman@gmail.com> wrote:

It's my understanding that Alexa is heavily skewed towards measuring web browsing by marketing folks because they are the main people who have installed the Alexa client.

The Google PageRank displayed via the Google toolbar is notoriously slow to update, which makes it typically out-of-date.

A couple of years ago, there was an interesting conflict between two of the most popular video blogs/podcasts/whatever - zeFrank and Rocketboom. ZeFrank pointed to alexa data that showed his hits much higher, despite rocketboom's claim to the contrary. Rocketboom's argument is that page hits is very different from number of times a video is downloaded. ... Richard On 2/5/08 6:27 AM, "Jessie Daniels" <jessiedanielsnyc@gmail.com> wrote:

I've used Alexa.com in some of my research as a marker of website popularity. It seems to be a well-trusted source by industry. I'd be interested in hearing others' opinion of it.

Jessie Daniels, PhD CUNY-Hunter College

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