Yeah, kind and gentle readers, The Dojo is ranking full stop at 12,008,698. Ain’t that sweet! Whatever. I shed the mock enthusiasm for more realistic observations. Alexa, the b@$tard child of search engines, seems to me a pretty useless gauge of who is popular on the internet. Why? Because you need to have a toolbar (or more recently, a FireFox plug-in) installed just to pass your usage statistics to Alexa in the first place. Before the Mac-compatible version of Alexa came out there were no usage stats from Mac users. Yup, all of Alexa was defined by Windows users. For years, in fact, so all of that historical data they have on web trends are all skewed.

So, why is it a big deal to me? Honestly, I could care less about Alexa, though I stuck a stupid little ranking badge at the bottom of the site. However, certain public relations firms will not talk to me or consider the Dojo real unless I have an Alexa rank. Even then, my Alexa ranking must be better than 50,000. I just find it amazing that a site which draws, at the moment, around 120,000 readers a month (250,000 a month back in 2003, yo!) is considered siteus non gratis because Alexa doesn’t know about it. Alexa is a consumer-oriented trends tracking site, so only non-technical people are going to install the toolbar or plug-in anyway. This isn’t you.

If anything, Google’s, Yahoo’s, and Live Search’s statistics should be a good gauge of what goes on over the intarweb. Alexa just isn’t that important.

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