May
28
How do you know how popular a site really is? You don't, and everyone exaggerates. There debate about how good Alexa is, because I guess it's fairly easy to manipulate the rankings. URLFAN is another ranking system that is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.
Now every website owner can see who's talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the traffic of a website, such as Alexa. However ://URLFAN is different. They rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.
Unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in the ranking system since they use concrete data to generate the results. And the longer data is collected, the more accurate the system will become. Hopefully this will provide publishers with a useful tool in tracking their sites and how their content is referenced by other websites.
