Metropolis Magazine reviews Google’s horrid new offices.
It takes the ‘working here is so much fun we’re so playful’ spin to its most simplistic architectural representation - bright colors and toys.
All of these, of course, are a thin veneer over the reality - a strip lit, cubicle ridden, hell hole, like a parody of The Office.
Google’s products are still failry sophisticated - I hope the office environment doesn’t rub off.
Back from vacation and noticed that the People Aggregator is already up.
Congrats to Marc and everyone involved! Wishing you every well deserved success.
Focus on ‘Reach’, use Rank anomalies, and the ‘geek factor’ for audience, to lower the reach figures to get the real picture for some sites.
Many ‘web 2.0′ startups are likely to have a bunch of their own employees who have the Alexa bar installed and are feverish stats obsessives. For moderate ranked sites this can skew Alexa since their own traffic is a significant percentage of the overall number of Alexa users who hit the site. Fortunatley, you can actually use this to help correct the stats.
Here are some rules of thumb I use to get better stats:
1. Ignore Page views and Rank, for sites that are not in the top 5,000.
2. Always monitor your own site, from a machine that does not have Alexa istalled then look at your site’s reach vs another’s reach and then your sites rank vs another’s rank. If there is a marked difference in the spread between these 2 sets of figures such that rank looks relatively better than reach for the competitor site, then they probably boost their own Alexa figures. Depending on the spread you can actually use this to your advantage to calculate the appropriate reduction in their reach numbers.
3. Weigh in the ‘geek factor’. A site with 1000 geek marketing types will likely have a higher Alexa than 100,000 teens. Look at inbound links to the sites and try and figure out the audience and weight appropriately.
Ironic - you can now check your previous dependencies on Independence Day.
A good time to check and see if your last name shows in the Origins Database, if you have Irish or British ancestors. The site will be free for a day and a half over the holiday.
RSS