ChallengeReligion.com

This morning, when I was checking Planet Atheism, as I always do (like I've always said, I created it mostly for selfish reasons: I love reading what other atheist bloggers write, in a convenient place :)), I found a couple of references to ChallengeReligion.com. What's this, I thought? A new competitor?

So, naturally, I checked. Here are my first impressions: ChallengeReligion (CR from now on) is an interesting mix of a Digg, a Technorati, and a normal aggregator such as PA. It's like Digg because posts are ranked by popularity, like Technorati because it measures "popularity" according to incoming links from other blogs (unlike Digg, where people vote), and like an aggregator because you can then read posts from there -- though they only publish excerpts. I believe they do the latter because, unlike PA, they didn't ask permission from the bloggers; since they just publish excerpts, it's OK, I guess.

Oh, and it looks quite good, which is no surprise, as they have a whole team behind it... and many others. Yes, CR is just one of many Digg/Technorati/aggregators; they have others, about many different subjects. More power to them. :) I could create PA clones in minutes, too (though it would take time to get member blogs, since I prefer full aggregation, and that implies asking first).

It may be useful as a source of extra traffic, but it's not useful to me, because... "all together now..." I like to read blogs in a convenient place. :) Also, while the posts populary feature is interesting, it may also have its drawbacks; for instance, what if a blogger is publishing a series of posts, the first appears there, but the next ones aren't linked enough, and therefore never appear?

Note that I'm not actually criticizing CR or saying that there's something wrong with the concept; I just prefer a normal aggregator, which to me works like the "morning newspaper" (or afternoon, or evening, or whenever I open the page :)).

More additions to the PA top Technorati ranks table

The top technorati ranks table for Planet Atheism members has been improved again. :) In addition to showing the Technorati rank, number of incoming links (from Technorati as well), and Google Pagerank, the table now shows Alexa ranks as well.

You can now also click on any of the above column titles to sort the table by that particular value/rank. Incoming links and Pagerank are "the more, the merrier", while Technorati rank and Alexa rank are "the lower, the better", so sorting takes that into account.

A note of warning: I've mentioned before that you shouldn't really take any of these ranks too seriously, and this is especially true for the Alexa ranks. Alexa is a nice idea (it's the only one that measures traffic instead of incoming links), but it has the following problems:

• it only counts hits if the user has installed either the Alexa toolbar (for Internet Explorer) or the SearchStatus Firefox extension (I recommend the latter, since, as everyone knows, MSIE sucks), and
• it often lumps all subdomains for a particular domain together (i.e. doesn't distinguish between aaa.domain.com and bbb.domain.com, even though they may be totally unrelated). It apparently has some hard coded exceptions for some (not all) blogspot.com blogs... but the values aren't really reliable. Still, you can use it to measure the changes in traffic for one site.

Incidentally, the application I've coded (and have been improving) to generate this table from a list of blogs is almost ready for public release. :)

Pharyngula, and Technorati ranks

We have a new member: Pharyngula. I imagine most of you already know that blog very, very well. :) Many thanks to PZ Myers for joining Planet Atheism.

And now for something completely different... I just coded (for fun) a couple of scripts to show a table of Technorati incoming links and ranks for all the PA members. The table is sorted by Technorati ranks, which are kind of (that is, don't take it too seriously) a measure a blog's success among other blogs; it counts the recent (180 days or less) links to a blog. How that rank is calculated is kind of mysterious, though, and, anyway, it's not a perfect system (for instance, some of the blogs are listed as having 0 links, which obviously can't be true, unless those blogs aren't listed on Technorati yet). [EDIT: that seems to be the case; the blogs are there, but don't have ranks yet. It must take some time.]

Therefore, don't put too much faith in it, and don't use it as a measure for the success of your blog. It's a toy. For fun. Nothing more. If you know another members of PA personally, it allows for playful competition among you, but I hope you don't start any real life feuds or something. :)

Since it involves making 76 queries (and rising) to Technorati, I'm updating it only once a day (midnight GMT). Enjoy...

[EDIT: added each blog's Google PageRank to the table. Why not? :) ]