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Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank. Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy. In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy’s real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure). This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax ‘page flakes’ but there is no advertising system for Ajax. To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C’s….

The sometimes delusional cycle of Web 2.0 companies and VCs looking at Alexa rankings, does often acknowledge that Alexa is a bit skewed, as if its out by perhaps 50%. Well its a boat load skewed, Alexa is actually only about 5% accurate if one uses data from Gawker. Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact – I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn’t, Deadspin, Alexa’s accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore. Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin’s 10,000 ranking. Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15…

Amazon’s EC2 is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a while – If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss. EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2. From there on you pay only for CPU time and bandwidth. This is the grid computing that Oracle has been bullshitting about, and chenges the landscape for hosting – allowing instant, on-demand scaleability and no upfront hardware costs, or per unit rackspace fees. I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the ‘launch’ problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks. I…

Has Digg Been Hijacked, by FUD Today a largely factually based story with referenced quotes and run by the Associated Press, which was also reported in most US newspapers is flagged by Digg as potentially Inacurate. I’ve noticed recently that a large number of political stories, particularly left of center ones, get slapped with the ‘Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inacurate” – Because enough people who want to deliberately create uncertainty in light of the truth, say so. This is the way wikipedia does it, and to be honest, with no other option for wikipedia, it means that Wikipedia is largely useless and hopelessly banal for contentious political issues. But news is not like Wikipedia – users are directly linking to a source not editing it. If people on the political fringes moan, that does not necessarily mean that the source is innacurate. The Wikipedia reputation system…