nonsmokingarea.com

Evan Williams compared about 30 podcasting-sites by their average weekly Alexa ranking. besides well-known flaws in Alexa’s ranking and Williams probably being biased (he’s CEO of second-ranked Odeo.com), the results are quite interesting. the top-ten according to Alexa include hosting service libsyn (1), portals like Odeo (2) or Podomatic (3), content-networks like Podshow (5) and Podtech (10) and directories Podcast Pickle (4), PodcastAlley (6) and Podcast.net (8).

podcast-creators can use the ranking to check if their show is listed in the most important directories. while many sites discover podcasts automatically (probably by fingering data from other directories or the now-obsolete indiepodder.org), some might need a hint to index your feed.

update: Cameron Reilly from The Podcast Network points out that - for what reason ever - TPN has not been listed by Williams - he claims rank 10 right above Podtech…which proves what Williams points out himself: that the list is by no means complete.

Seth Godin and Ron Hornbaker from Alexaholic (a smart tool for comparing several sites by their Alexa traffic-data) have put together a comprehensive ranking of almost 1.000 web2.0-websites (’web2.0′ being defined as sites that ‘let people collaborate and share information online in a new way’ - Wikipedia).

while it’s fun to grep through the list (from rank 500 downwards it gets quite obscure), I don’t think it’s really relevant - the mix of compared websites is just too diverse. or is there anything remarkable in that developer-targeted sites like rubyonrails.com or dojotoolkit.com are outnumbered by consumer-sites like myspace.com or del.icio.us? in between there are random personal blogs, while authorities like TechCrunch are missing. I’ld suggest to split the list into categories like ‘consumer’, ‘dev/backend’ and ‘media’. furthermore, Alexa’s objectivity is of couse debatable, at best.

thx to Marcus, I finally rediscovered the SimCity-esque traffic-visualizer I mentioned some days ago. VisitorVille by World Market Watch is a Windows desktop-application building game-like graphic representations of webserver log-files. pages are represented as buildings, visitors referring from search-engines arrive in Google- or AOL-busses and carry a passport disclosing details like javascript- & flash-support and screen-resolution.

with monthly fees of USD 89,- for sites with up to 5.000 unique daily visitors, VisitorVille’s eyecandy seems quite costly, especially since the user-interface looks a bit outdated (think Windows 2000). moreover, the downloadable demo is restricted to a random dataset, which makes evaluation difficult. still I think the underlying idea of visualizing website-traffic in a metropolitan environment is original - so if you’re into traffic-analysis, keep an eye on a potential update to VisitorVille.

analyzing website-traffic using the server’s access-log and common (free) tools like awstats or webalizer hasn’t really progressed a lot during the past years. the problem is, that log-data is too abstract for many business-executives and terms like ‘visit’, ‘unique visitors’ and ‘pages’ aren’t well-defined (f.e. the concept of ‘visit’ is based on an assumed timeframe/duration, which might differ among statistical tools). visualization service clickdensity offers an additional view on access-logs using heat-maps. by recording every single mouse-click (this is accomplished by integrating a javascript-snippet), clickdensity can generate visual representations of what links users are most likely to click on. moreover, clickdensity records the average time a user takes for his click.

clickdensity offers a 30day free-trial which records up to 5.000 clicks. the ‘Standard’-package for £50 records 250.00 clicks, high-traffic websites will be charged higher fees (see the details).

TechCrunch points to similar products, which in case of ClickTale (currently in closed beta) even record whole user-sessions to mini-movies, which is a nice feature if you plan deep anaylsis of how your visitors use your website. with the exception of Google Analytics (which doesn’t offer heat-maps), most services in the area of traffic-analysis are not free. clickdensity’s service seems quite pricy, but it’s a very clean way to get insight on top-level user-behaviour.

edit: can anyone remember that log-analyzer (probably 3+ years ago?) which visualized traffic-data in a SimCity-like animated environment? can’t recall that product’s name…

june 2006 spawned the largest monthly increase in the number of registered domains since the existence of the netcraft survey. netcraft now counts 85.4 million domains, 3.3 million more than in may 2006. the accleration in domain-registration is mainly explained by the ongoing popularity of (personal? I guess so…) blogging.

interestingly, microsoft seizes loads of hosted domains from apache, increasing their market-share by approximately 4% to 29.7% (apache: down by 3.5% to 61.3% market share, in other words apache lost about 16% market-share in the last three months!). however, these rather drastic numbers have to be taken with a pinch of salt: according to netcraft, a good part of apaches losses are explained by major registrar/hosting-companies, like Go Daddy, moving about 1.6 million parked domains from apache to windows-servers.

details & graphs: netcraft web server survey june 2006

of course, scoble likes such news - maybe it’s time to check out sharepoint 2007?