1,000 Spam Comments

January 22nd, 2007

BlogsToday, Aksimet announced it has caught 1,000 spam comments. I feel so honored.

It’s interesting how things sort of snowball with this blog. In addition to Techmeme, Webomatica is now showing up in Megite, another blog aggregator I read. The last one I’m keeping my eye on it Tailrank. This blog is climbing up the Technorati ranks quicker than I thought I would. If I hit 100 blogs linking in and crack 50,000 I’ll have to come up with a different goal - and buy myself an ice cream sundae.

Meanwhile, I signed up for Google Analytics which provides regular doses of info-porn regarding your website. Not only can you see exactly what articles people are checking out, but it’s all graphed with pie charts and bar graphs so you can see progress over time. Things seem to have stablized traffic-wise, but one benefit of Techmeme and Megite is I haven’t had to submit stuff to digg or Shoutwire to keep the numbers up.

Anyhow, by using the server logs and Google Analytics, I’ve come to the same conclusion as others that Alexa can be inaccurate. There’s no indication of my Shoutwire traffic spike. Maybe that digg spike is throwing things off.

In the spring I’m moving to a four day a week, ten hour day work schedule. So every wednesday I’ll have more time to work on this stuff. This blog isn’t my primary reason for adjusting my schedule, but I hope to get a little more clarity on what I’m doing and where it’s going. Hopefully it’s not to some Second Life purgatory.

Lastly, I commented out the MyBlogLog stuff temporarialy since for some reason it was halting page loads of this blog… can’t have that. I hope MyBlogLog hasn’t gotten too popular for its own good… I really like their service.

Note: //engtech posted a solution that worked for me - use a different version of the MyBlogLog sidebar widget that uses images instead of JavaScript. Check it out.

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Viewing 7 Comments

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    Yeah Analytics is pretty nice. That's what we're using for metrics tracking.

    I totally concur on Alexa. It's a joke. Bottom line. Maybe it's valid for the top 1000 sites, but I honestly don't see how it can begin to track the breadth of sites after that using a panel-based system. There's just no way. Smaller sites are just never going to register properly, especially when the panel is self-selecting (i.e. folks who download the alexa toolbar).

    Our best Alexa rank is still from the day we got techcrunched back in August. But per analytics, we've seen days with 20x the traffic (uniques and pvs) of that day since, but haven't even come close to the alexa rank since. I'm sure others can corroborate.

    But suffice to say, when I see folks quoting alexa numbers, I usually just roll my eyes. For most of us not in the top 1000, these numbers are pretty much meaningless.

    Of course, this problem isn't unique to alexa. When I used to use comscore/mediametrix/nielsen etc. at Yahoo or Ziff the same problem existed. Bottom line is these types of companies are still using an old-school network TV solution (small survey group/panel reporting) for a long-tail web (which kinda defies small sample groups). I don't know how you fix it, but surely some upstart company out there must be saying...wtf? Why do we keep trying to track web usage in this fashion?
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    Oh and congratulations on the 1000 spams and the techcrunch ranking :-)
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    Hey dave... yeah... the alexa thing is wacked... as with you guys, the Google Analytics and my own server logs had me scratching my head.

    In an ideal world, sites would move away from page views and something more tangible like user satisfaction, unique users, user loyalty, or time spent on a site.

    Then there is the issue of more sites getting into the ajaxy type stuff which can make a site more useable but reduces page views. I'm all for usability at the expense of pageviews. But for some dudes wanting to keep the page views up, they might decide against usability.

    The best example: sites that break up "top ten" lists into ten web pages so you have to click on each one to see the next entry! That's annoying. So they might get more page views out of me but as a user I have a bad impression of the site.
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    Technorati Rank is really easy to acquire until the sub-10,000 range. Once you get beyond 5,000 you pretty much stop checking since it changes in a positive fashion so infrequently.

    I have some old stat pages from when I started. Kind of funny, looking back. http://engtech.wordpress.com/tag/stats

    I'm up to 4000 akismet spams a month now. The !@#$ers.

    One solution to slow MyBlogLog loads is to use the image mechanism instead of javascript... since it will just show empty space until they're loaded. http://engtech.wordpress.com/2007/01/15/myblogl...
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    Pretty sweet, engtech. If this blog ever gets close to your position I'll chalk that up as evidence we're in a Web 2.0 bubble :) But if that means 4000 spams a day - sheez, how do you deal with it? Delete delete delete?

    Anyhow, thanks for the MyBlogLog info - I need to fix that.
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    I deal with the spam by using Akismet and outright blocking .info and .biz. Have to check comments once a day, but not that bad. Real popular sites get like 100,000s a day.

    I have no doubt that you'll do well on Technorati. You've got a really good blog going on here.
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    Sheeez.... 100,000 spams a day? I'm surprised the internet doesn't collapse under the weight!

    Thanks for the nice comment regarding technorati. Keeping track of the progress gives me something to watch over, kind of like magic rocks growing. I think there's something about people interested in tech where it's fun to track proress of stuff that makes others' eyes glaze over.

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