Slashdot Mirror

From AboutUs.com - http://www.aboutus.org/ReverseCode.com

and Alexa

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/main?url=reverse code.com

Probably not. But that's just because a Slashdotting is not what it used to be.

Server hardware has gotten so powerful that even a site running an untuned and uncached PHP/MySQL-based CMS can readily withstand a Slashdotting. With most low-end hosting plans offering 100 GB or more of bandwidth each month, exhausting such limits is no longer an issue.

While it may be somewhat suspect, we can look at the Alexa data showing Digg getting far more traffic than Slashdot, and other sites like Reddit and Netscape being close behind. If a site can survive a Digging, then handling a Slashdotting is going to be virtually nothing.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=google.be

Alexa ranks the Belgian google site as the 267 th site on the internet. Higher than slashdot, so I think it would still matter to google, every dollar counts.

That budget is a year and a half old; wikipedia's traffic has increased more than tenfold over that period.

I'm a happy post-Yahoo Flickr Pro user. I'm sorry, but you're just making shit up:

Few features have been added, and those that have are of a blatantly revenue-generating nature

Geotagging? A complete redesign of the batch editing tool? Massively scaling the servers to accommodate the huge growth in traffic?

And can you honestly say that some of the printing services they have partnered with don't offer an extremely interesting range of services?

and the whole idea is to develop Flickr users into users of Yahoo's other (ad-laden) services

Oh please. The single link to Yahoo on Flickr is the tiny logo on the bottom-right of the site. If anything, it's enabled Yahoo users to use Flickr instead of Yahoo Photos. Like the Flickr badges on Yahoo 360, for example.

FYI, it's a deliberate choice for Yahoo to keep their old Yahoo Photos service separate - it's a completely different audience.

It would be trivial to allow users to create a hidden photo album with an obscure URL, and then only distribute that to people they want to see the photos, but this request has been ignored for upwards of a year or more now.

This was implemented last year. But don't let that stop you lying about it having not been implemented.

You have obviously not been paying attention to Flickr. To the point that I doubt you're a user. But, as is the Way Of The Moron - you decided to complain about it anyway.

I think that the article is overdramatic, and maybe a bit of self-promoting.

According to ALexa (look at Reach), they dropped by roughly a factor of 2 to 3, from 100 to 150 per million, depending on the base period chosen, to about 50 per million. A factor of three variation in site traffic over a few weeks is large, but it's not the end of the world.

I believe so - according to Alexa, the top five (in order) are, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Baidu.com and MySpace.

So, yeah, MSN.com and not microsoft.com or even (we can only hope) windowsupdate.com

I agree, I would like to see this list
According to: http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_500
1) Yahoo
2) Microsoft
3) Google

according to the article
1) MSN
2) Google
3) Yahoo

so the lists are ugh, exactly reversed?
I'd love to know what methodology they used.

most imagesearches give you a filtered and nonfiltered option but where is the porn only search from a big company? you can trick alexa into giving you porn only i wonder if they know but i bet they got the rankings wrong! rofl come on google, give us what we want!

... Alexa released the only Image Search where you can specifically look for porn. That's what we all really wanted anyway, right?

... Alexa released the only Image Search where you can specifically look for porn. That's what we all really wanted anyway, right?

... Alexa released the only Image Search where you can specifically look for porn. That's what we all really wanted anyway, right?

The Slashdot effect just isn't what it used to be. This could be due to a number of factors, the main ones being a decreasing number of readers, and advances in server technology.

Rumor has it that many Slashdot users have moved to sites like Reddit and Digg. According to Alexa, Digg has seen massive growth, Reddit has seen moderate growth, and Slashdot's reach has been tapering off. I know many find Alexa's data to be suspect, but it is still worth considering.

Even low-end servers today can handle massive amounts of traffic with ease. While hundreds of hits per second could take down a 200 MHz server quite easily a few years back, it's not uncommon for even dynamically generated sites on shared hosts to barely notice a Slashdotting or even a Digging.

Also they get 500 million unique users a day on the world's most popular web site.

Well what about this metric?

I'm not a fan of Yahoo myself, but my 20, 25, and 30-year old non-technical siblings grew up using Yahoo. They don't want or need the laser focus of information retrieval that a search engine like Google provides. They just want to go on the web and be presented with interesting, entertaining or diversionary content. Yahoo.com and MSN.com are perfect for that.

If they want to know what's going on in the world, they don't have to craft a clever search query, or know what RSS Aggregators are. They can go to www.yahoo.com and get a little of everything.

It's easy to say Yahoo.com and MSN.com suck, but until every netizen is as Internet-savvy as the average Slashdot reader, portals aren't going away, and they will continue to get and keep eyeballs.

Just because yahoo didn't die years ago it means it's impossible for them to die?

I don't think yahoo is inmmortal, specially at this precise moment

Actually, it's probably only true because Hotmail is hosted on that domain. Read the "Where do people go on msn.com?" part of the Alexa page: 84% of the traffic to msn.com apparently goes to Hotmail.

The traffic you send to amazon.com from slashdot won't make a dent in amazon's traffic, retard.

So the owner of Universal Tube complained that his site was crippled when it got 68 million hits for all of august. Yet they were able to manage 20-million hits in one day - the day the news article about them hit the web.

Should they be suing every news website? The entire blogosphere? Maybe they are just suing google to see if they will settle by hosting utube.com for them.

Can we have figures from before youtube arrived?

I'm willing to bet that time & money invested invested in wikipedia << time wasted searching fruitlessly for some guy's webpage by 60 million people. But I'm sure the wikipedia article will link to those guy's research if I need to fact check.

Professors are not the ones who will decide whether Wikipedia will make the grade or not. The populus will. And the populus has already decided. I know a number of people who now go to Wikipedia first, Google second.

Anyone notice Alexa is not ranked?

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? url=alexa.com

Sorry but Alexa is still useful to guage trends and "generalized" site popularity.

Here's a great example: POXNORA STATS

PoxNora is a game that was slashdotted last week. See the big spike in their traffic graph (roughly Oct 13/14)?? That's when they got slashdotted. Don't tell me Alexa stats are completely useless.

Has to be the Firefox thing, there is no such jump in msn.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=msn.c om#top
or amazon.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=amazo n.com#top these places I guess are mostly Firefox-neutral.

Has to be the Firefox thing, there is no such jump in msn.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=msn.c om#top
or amazon.com
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=amazo n.com#top these places I guess are mostly Firefox-neutral.

I guess so... The same value jump is there in May for the "spanish slashdot" website, http://barrapunto.com/ http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=1y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=www.b arrapunto.com#top

Moin,

I guess Alexa changed some metric at that date, because search.cpan.org also had a jump:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=searc h.cpan.org#top

Have fun!

According to this, there is no FF version. There are third party plugins for monitoring only.

I've pointed this out before. There are weird statistical anomolies that should show that Alexa's webratings are not perfect. Take a look at this data for Slashdot and Digg. The traffic ratings both shoot up withing a s short amount of time. It just doesn't make much sense. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=www.digg.com&y =r&url=www.slashdot.org#top

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=&size=large&compare_sites=&y=r&url=ww.com

not on an absolute scale, but you can compare trends, and if YOU don't fake the data you're ok :)

remove space for link to work

Take a look at Alexa traffic rankings for "social networking" sites. Many, if not most, of them have already peaked.

EZboard peaked mid 2003. Nerve peaked early 2002. Bondage.com peaked mid-2003. Tribe peaked early 2006. Xianz (the "Christian Myspace") peaked in spring 2006. Friendster peaked twice, once in late 2005 and again in mid-2006, but that's an unusual pattern. Usually, once they peak, it's downhill after that. Myspace has flattened and looks like it's about to peak. This works just like nightclubs; they become hot, they grow, they get too popular, they get overrun, they decline, they hang on, but nobody cares.

If you try to "monetize" the users, they leave sooner.

The real winner in this space seems to be AdultFriendFinder.com. 57th most popular site on the web, 35th in the US, steady traffic for two years, and it's a pay site. Run by Friendfinder, Inc., the notorious spammers. They seem to have figured out how to "monetize the user base". However, Friendfinder may be inflating their statistics.

Tribe was bought by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch's company) a few months ago. He seems to have bought near the top. Many of the staff left. The recent site redesign (New! Web 2.0!) was something of a flop. Currently, the most active tribe seems to be "Tribe.net bug reports". Alexa traffic rankings show that Tribe.net peaked around January 2006. It's been downhill since. The current traffic level is about half the peak.

These things work like fads. Remember Nerve.com? Peaked in early 2002 at 4x the present level. They're still around, but nobody cares much.

There's a death spiral to these things. When traffic drops off, so does revenue. Then there's a frantic attempt to boost revenue by making the ads more intrusive, usually accompanied by layoffs. This drives away users.

Live by the click, die by the click.

Tribe was bought by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch's company) a few months ago. He seems to have bought near the top. Many of the staff left. The recent site redesign (New! Web 2.0!) was something of a flop. Currently, the most active tribe seems to be "Tribe.net bug reports". Alexa traffic rankings show that Tribe.net peaked around January 2006. It's been downhill since. The current traffic level is about half the peak.

These things work like fads. Remember Nerve.com? Peaked in early 2002 at 4x the present level. They're still around, but nobody cares much.

There's a death spiral to these things. When traffic drops off, so does revenue. Then there's a frantic attempt to boost revenue by making the ads more intrusive, usually accompanied by layoffs. This drives away users.

Live by the click, die by the click.

well, just have a look at alexa's ratings http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=640&h=480&r=1y&z= &y=r&u=utube.com/&u= the site has only really started to receive some kind of traffic after youtube came to existence. Also, that traffic has basically tripled thanks to the slashdot/digg/every-other-website-that-posted-this -story effect

Please restate the statement. China has never denied the Tiananmen Square incident; in fact, it is one of the most important history lessons. It was Japan that changed history to "look good", e.g. denying the Nanking Massacre, just like some people think the Holocaust was made-up. Take a look at the Alexa top-100 most visited websites, Chinese is clearly the second dominant language in cyberspace. I'm sure Wikipedia is just as happy as the Chinese people about the decision.

Why does everybody think Google wants YouTube for tech when it's obvious they want it for traffic?

YouTube is up there in traffic rankings, which must be what they're after. What does YouTube have that Google Video doesn't? Gobs of unique IP hits, ergo buyout.

Koders and even Krugle guys precede Google's code search, but they are going to have a hard time attracting more developers' eyeballs - check this.
Too bad one can't get Google code search on there, too, but you can imagine how far that graph curve would be.

I don't know if it's worth that much, but it sure is worth a lot...

Myspace will ultimately be worth nothing. Myspace is already past the height of its popularity, its just coasting on momentum which will run out eventually.

About the "sticky issue". I'd like to add another datapoint, the Global Track Chart of Last.fm. Acording to Alexa they reach 1 on every 500 people, so Last.fm's data is pretty good. From these charts, only "Justin Timberlake - SexyBack" from the top-10 "pirated tracks" is in this week's top-200 of Last.fm.

So, maybe.. what the current top tracks are, isn't that important. How they compare to the long tail (everything else), might. If the current top-10/50/200 really points to big chunk of exploitable market, then of course the music studios should go for it. But quite possibly there's much more to be had from a longer vision than just "what's cool now".

A Last.fm like site that would mail me hardcopy's to keep of stuff I like and might like, on a subscription basis. I think that could work really well. Last.fm already links to Amazon.com, they might as well take the next step.

I wonder if the original submitter happens to browse with the A9 or Alexa toolbars enabled? Both are subsidiaries of Amazon.com. One would need to review their EULA's though to see if said info can be used to target shopping ads from their own site.

As the article notes, you can't really un-ring the bell of publishing something online, which is exactly what HA wanted to do. Obeying robots.txt files is voluntary, after all, and if the company didn't want the information online, they shouldn't have put it there in the first place."

To remove a site from the Wayback Machine, place a robots.txt file at the top level of your site (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and then submit your site below.

The robots.txt file will do two things:

          1. It will remove all documents from your domain from the Wayback Machine.

          2. It will tell the Internet Archives crawler not to crawl your site in the future.

To exclude the Internet Archive's crawler (and remove documents from the Wayback Machine) while allowing all other robots to crawl your site, your robots.txt file should say:

                                              User-agent: ia_archiver

                                              Disallow: /

Robots.txt is the most widely used method for controlling the behavior of automated robots on your site (all major robots, including those of Google, Alta Vista, etc. respect these exclusions). It can be used to block access to the whole domain, or any file or directory within. There are a large number of resources for webmasters and site owners describing this method and how to use it. Here are a few:

                      http://www.global-positioning.com/robots_text_file /index.html

                      http://www.webtoolcentral.com/webmaster/tools/robo ts_txt_file_generator

                      http://pageresource.com/zine/robotstxt.htm

Once you have put a robots.txt file up, submit your site (www.yourdomain.com) on the form on http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html# crawl_site.

The robots.txt file must be placed at the root of your domain (www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt). If you cannot put a robots.txt file up, submit a request to wayback2@archive.org.

From Wikimedia Meta-Wiki:

What is changing?

We want to open up editing without damaging the reader's experience.

We want to be more wiki and let editors edit freely, which is where all the good things come from. At present a small percentage of articles (a few hundred out of 1.5 million on the English language Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/) are locked or partially locked from editing. We want to open these up. But Wikipedia is a top 20 website (Alexa ratings, no. 17 on 3 month average; no. 15 on 30 August 2006 -- http://www.alexa.com/), so we must keep it good for the readers.

The new feature will mean that edits from new or anonymous editors will be delayed before being shown to readers - they will see a 'flagged OK' version by default, with a link to the live version. The idea is to enhance the reading experience, and free us to enhance the editing experience. If vandalism can't be seen by the general public, there will be less motivation to vandalise.

Anonymous or new-editor edits will need to be approved by a logged-in editor. Of the thousands of editors on the large Wikipedias, many concentrate on checking revisions and dealing with odd changes and vandalism -- this will assist their work and we do not expect new delays.

We are also considering a related feature to flag particular versions of articles as being of high quality. This is to a different end: a high-quality finished product. This will likely be tested first on the German language Wikipedia (http://de.wikipedia.org/), which has already had three stable editions released on CD and DVD, which have sold quite well. If the feature works there, it may be used on other language Wikipedias.

These features are not finished, so we don't have a lot of fine detail as to how it will all work as yet. But we hope this change will allow us to do things such as open up the George W. Bush article or even the front page itself to full unrestricted editing.

When was this proposed?

Jimmy Wales asked for a time-delay feature for casual readers in late 2004; after very fast editing on the Indian Ocean tsunami produced a very high-quality article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_ea rthquake) very quickly, but with some highly visible vandalism; we've hotly discussed how to achieve stable high-quality editions of Wikipedia since almost the start of the project, in 2001.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? compare_sites=digg.com&range=6m&size=medium&y=r&ur l=slashdot.org

MySpace passed /. in Alexa rank years ago. Then again, Alexa's rankings probably aren't accurate based on the habits of your average Slashdotter...

Graph from Alexa.com showing myspace traffic vs slashdot traffic over 6 months. I don't think they need to worry about us.

Most websites (/. included) do not suck up bandwidth. Glancing at America's most popular websites, I see lots of sites that will run just fine on an 85 kbps connection. Of the top 25, here are the ones that will have real trouble: Myspace (only audio streaming should have real issues), YouTube, CNN videos, and maybe flickr. You need to forget that those of us here are far above average information consumers. There are many people who go online simply to utilize e-mail, check the headlines, and perform research. One reason that more bandwidth-intensive sites are so high is the fact that geeks like me visit those sites many times per week using several computers. There is definitely a market for free85 kpbs wireless Internet service.

but I really can't take any book seriously titled "Building Scalable Web Sites" that explains itself using PHP and mySQL. I know PHP/mySQL have their place but I just don't think of them as industrial strength.

Flickr is the 41st most used website in the world, so scoff at your peril. And I say that as a heavy OO guy who does a lot of Java work.

I've seen Cal's day-long presentation that appears to have been turned into this book. He's very smart, and has done great work making the technologies suit their needs. He has proven that you can scale these technologies up to handle massive traffic while building a lot of neat stuff along the way. If the book is half as good as his presentation, it's well worth it.

My main scaling concern with this approach is instead that I don't see how they'll scale up the number of developers. Database-centric apps end up mainly being about the care and feeding of your database servers, and Flickr's no exception to that. PHP seems to be just fine for page rendering, but I haven't seen anything to convince me that it's a good general-purpose language like Java, Ruby, or Python. So with databases screwing up your abstractions on one end and PHP limiting them on the other, I'd worry that the code base is on the long-term path to being both rigid and fragile.

So with Flickr, my real measure for them will be whether they can keep innovating like they did in their first couple of years. If not, I'll suspect that the two-tier PHP/MySQL architecture is at fault.

Tip of the hat to yahoo who may strangely become relevant again.

I'm sorry, remind me how the web portal that's held the number one spot in traffic rankings for years could ever be considered irrelevant?

Sure, they haven't been in the limelight like google has in a few years, but they've still got more eyeballs than anyone else, still employ thousands, and still churn out new stuff all the time.