nonsmokingarea.com

Amazon’s traffic ranking-service Alexa finally gets rid of its most criticized flaw - strong bias towards Internet Explorer - by releasing their toolbar for the Firefox browser!

it will be interesting to see how strong this is going to affect rankings over the next few weeks, while ‘Sparky’ (the nickname of the Firefox-extension) supposedly experiences some adpotion. of course, if Alexa’s extrapolation-algorithms have been on par, we probably might not see any changes at all…

sure, it’s common sense that Alexa’s traffic-stats have to be taken with a big grain of salt (the under-representation of traffic from non IE-browsers is only one major reason). but today Jason Calacanis goes a step further by claiming Alexa can be gamed (=manipulated) with no more than three clients running their toolbar & keeping an auto-refresh locked on the ‘optimized’ URL. during the next 10 days he’s conducting an experiment using his own site calacanis.com. if it’s really that easy (and well-known, as one commenter claims), I wonder why Alexa is still quoted at all…

for the record: calacanis.com is ranked at 13,773 as of today. in case you wonder: the recent peak starting nov 15th is caused by Jason’s resignation from AOL.