Shadows.com, one of the social bookmarking sites we have been tracking shut down on the 16 August 2007 - RIP

We waited a few days to see if the site comes back live again, but it appears that the owners of the site have shut it down without warning - permanently. This caused a few minor iritations with our software and ranking, but this should be sorted out by latest today.

Fortunately a few days ago we added bluedot.us to our list of social bookmarking sites we track and they have proven themselves with decent and reliable results and can only be highly recommended as a a bookmarking service of choice.

Last week bbc.co.uk decided to tap into the the web 2.o phenomenon and allow readers to directly submit interesting news stories to the following social bookmarking sites: Digg, Facebook, Reddit, del.icio.us and Stumbleupon.

It is a win-win situation for all parties concerned. BBC will gain access to a younger more in touch audience and the social bookmarking marking sites will see a substantial increase in traffic from the BBC.

The BBC is already in the Backtags top 3 "Social Popularity " ranking and these additions to their news stories will further cement their position and even catapult them to the top of the rankings in the following weeks.

The most popular video game sites, this time ranked by the worldwide community and not Alexa, Quantcast, Hitwise, Compete or Yahoo/Google back links etc. This list should provide anybody with any cheat, review or code they may be looking for. Gamespot.com , joystiq.com and kotaku.com are the top three for August 2007.

Backtags collects bookmarks from various social bookmarking sites and determines the "Social Popularity" of any given website. The following bookmarking sites are currently queried - Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Bloglines, Furl, Yahoo, Shadows, Clipmarks, Bluedot and we are testing Mister-Wong (German).

So what dows this mean? In essense Backtags relies on the following : "The more users who bookmark a website or content on a particular website the more popular thiswebsite must be". The community gives a vote of confidence when adding a bookmark to a social bookmarking site to either keep track of the site, to view the site in the future or to make other users/friends aware of the presence of a website or a new and interesting article.

Rank		28 Top Video Game review sites		Backtags Rank	Alexa Rank	Google PR
1		gamespot.com		31	146	8
2		joystiq.com		127	3835	7
3		kotaku.com		168	2124	6
4		1up.com		228	2980	8
5		gametrailers.com		301	596	4
6		ign.com		439	168	7
7		gamefaqs.com		661	202	7
8		destructoid.com		734	6099	6
9		computerandvideogames.com		818	9909	6
10		gamedaily.com		908	10323	7
11		gamepro.com		1009	6162	8
12		gamesradar.com		1181	2308	7
13		gamespy.com		1892	1021	7
14		filefront.com		2078	186	8
15		fileplanet.com		2260	1477	7
16		gametab.com		2608	21463	7
17		games.net		2619	6162	7
18		everyvideogame.com		2731	67502	6
19		ugo.com		3834	4348	4
20		gamerankings.com		4868	8770	7
21		videogames.yahoo.com		5066	N/A	7
22		cheatcc.com		5313	2896	5
23		gameinformer.com		8469	23648	6
24		gamerevolution.com		12666	10606	7
25		strategyinformer.com		14246	10504	6
26		direct2drive.com		18586	12206	7
27		gamezone.com		23566	3040	7
28		gametap.com		30088	5101	7

* If you know of any video game site not in this list and you think it should belong here, please just leave a comment or contact us. We will then update the list accordingly for the following month.

[...]

The most popular blogs in the blogosphere, this time ranked by the worldwide community and not Alexa, Quantcast, Hitwise, Compete or Yahoo/Google back links etc.

Backtags collects bookmarks from 10 different social bookmarking sites and determines the "Social Popularity" of any given website. The following bookmarking sites are currently queried - Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Bloglines, Furl, Yahoo, Shadows, Clipmarks, Bluedot and we are testing Mister-wong (German).

So what dows this mean? In essense Backtags relies on the following : "The more users who bookmark a website or content on a particular website the more popular this website must be". The community gives a vote of confidence when adding a bookmark to a social bookmarking site to either keep track of the site, to view the site in the future or to make other users/friends aware of the presence of a website or a new and interesting article.

No doubt that the Backtags social ranking favours those sites with a rich and varying content and these are the best of the best from an estimated 27 million blogs worldwide.

Note: Currently Backtags only collects data from English social bookmarking sites (with one exception) and therefore the rankings are biased towards the English speaking community. For comparison purposes we have listed the traffic data from Alexa and the Google page rank (PR).

Rank		50 Top Blogs		Backtags Rank	Alexa Rank	Google PR
1		lifehacker.com		7	1135	7
2		engadget.com		8	572	8
3		gizmodo.com		10	728	7
4		boingboing.net		23	2405	7
5		huffingtonpost.com		34	2894	7
6		alternet.org		40	8166	7
7		makezine.com		43	7654	7
8		techcrunch.com		57	663	8
9		downloadsquad.com		64	7555	6
10		tuaw.com		73	6881	6
11		mashable.com		74	1317	7
12		treehugger.com		77	5031	6
13		lifehack.org		79	5324	6
14		readwriteweb.com		99	4560	7
15		tmz.com		100	830	7
16		43folders.com		114	24520	7
17		gigaom.com		116	5951	7
18		joystiq.com		125	3835	7
19		arstechnica.com		128	1814	7
20		kottke.org		139	18924	6
21		blog.outer-court.com		159	17705	0
22		kotaku.com		167	2124	6
23		dailykos.com		168	4835	7
24		consumerist.com		176	4014	6
25		alistapart.com		180	162996	8
26		crooksandliars.com		183	6325	6
27		thinkprogress.org		220	10945	7
28		googleblog.blogspot.com		238	6215	8
29		valleywag.com		261	3771	7
30		radar.oreilly.com		270	3323	8
31		macrumors.com		286	2701	7
32		autoblog.com		313	2338	7
33		metafilter.com		322	3390	7
34		micropersuasion.com		330	31187	7
35		somethingawful.com		334	1624	6
36		mozillazine.org		349	4759	8
37		problogger.net		374	2676	6
38		sethgodin.typepad.com		392	9080	7
39		neatorama.com		479	9456	6
40		blog.guykawasaki.com		578	10083	7
41		postsecret.blogspot.com		603	16105	7
42		mog.com		644	3617	6
43		newsbusters.org		655	24481	6
44		joelonsoftware.com		689	9678	6
45		hotair.com		745	19869	6
46		talkingpointsmemo.com		795	18498	7
47		thesuperficial.com		800	1491	7
48		vox.com		811	1396	8
49		defamer.com		820	13912	7
50		searchengineland.com		827	2202	7

* If you know of any blog not in this list and you think it should belong here, please just leave a comment or contact us. We will then update the list accordingly for the following month.

[...]

This is not another top something list, merely a summary of non English social bookmarking sites from around the world. Some of them are pure social bookmarking sites such as delicious and some of them social news sites similar to digg - just in other languages. The following languages are covered in this overview: Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Portugese (Brazilian), Spanish, Swedish, Romanian, Russian and Turkish.

We have ranked these sites according to lanuguage and "Social Popularity" and show the Alexa rank as well as the Google page rank as a comparative tool. Unfortunatly Backtags currently only collects data from English social bookmarking sites and therefore the rankings can be taken with a pinch of salt. The data is however sufficient to give you a rough idea of the popularity. Some of these almost unknown sites are extremely popular within their own countries, such as www.mister-wong.de in the German speaking countries and www.meneame.net in Spain. These sites should not to be underestimated for the future. Mister-Wong has already launched sister sites in Chinese, Spanish, French and Russian and very recently www.mister-wong.com in the US.

	Social Bookmarking Website *		Language	Backtags Rank	Alexa Rank	Google PR
	www.darabet.com		Arabic	77153	119228	3
	www.365key.com		Chinese	4406	53362	5
	www.hemidemi.com		Chinese	5214	23679	5
	www.bokee.com		Chinese	24558	229	6
	www.favorites.com.cn		Chinese	25473	243762	4
	www.mister-wong.cn		Chinese	36236	118314	6
	www.eezyy.info		Chinese	N/R	1497534	0
	www.watvindenwijover.nl		Dutch	13971	283317	5
	www.tagmos.nl		Dutch	57701	215049	3
	www.ekudos.nl		Dutch	N/R	57700	5
	www.scoopeo.com		French	5450	11744	6
	www.wikio.fr		French	8642	8185	6
	www.kopikol.net		French	17463	98220	6
	www.tapemoi.com		French	31404	111849	4
	www.bookmarks.fr		French	73785	184114	5
	www.mister-wong.fr		French	89069	99432	3
	www.linkertop.com		French	182662	316358	3
	www.mister-wong.de		German	8042	1915	7
	www.wikio.de		German	36552	45337	5
	www.webnews.de		German	20232	9549	6
	www.icio.de		German	32889	64184	5
	www.oneview.de		German	89018	52068	5
	www.alltagz.com		German	205098	1519979	3
	tag.schaufler.ch		German (Swiss)	245617	1414064	3
	www.seoigg.de		German	N/R	67018	0
	www.phigita.net		Greek	79588	192863	5
	segnalo.alice.it		Italian	3922	363	6
	oknotizie.alice.it		Italian	26248	53362	5
	www.socialdust.com		Italian	32517	211570	4
	www.ineffabile.it		Italian	389924	89544	4
	b.hatena.ne.jp		Japanese	2715	337	6
	pookmark.jp		Japanese	15510	42746	6
	clip.nifty.com		Japanese	15652	269**	5
	pingking.jp		Japanese	29030	80004	5
	listfreak.com		Japanese	30270	1005909	4
	www.flog.jp		Japanese	33250	125372	5
	mark.jolt.jp		Japanese	34944	121611	4
	bm.saaf.jp		Japanese	35884	93295	4
	lislog.livedoor.com		Japanese	37436	114**	5
	www.rootace.com		Japanese	48678	181759	4
	baqoo.cc		Japanese	62802	612696	3
	tags.blogpeople.net		Japanese	63578	13498	3
	www.blink.jp		Japanese	70715	276224	4
	www.corich.jp		Japanese	86610	24069	5
	flash-clip.net		Japanese	93613	162996	0
	sb.karigane.jp		Japanese	184848	550115	3
	batumark.com		Japanese	347897	1026560	2
	synclick.jp		Japanese	371487	688733	3
	mar.gar.in		Korean	35476	603659	5
	bookmarkr.net		Korean	40266	1597497	0
	www.news2.co.kr		Korean	42746	888219	4
	digg.lv		Latvian	21044	242898	4
	saites.lv		Latvian	182063	1208377	4
	www.eucurti.com.br		Portugese (Brazil)	13326	69864	5
	www.linkk.com.br		Portugese (Brazil)	23331	31074	5
	www.ouvidizer.com		Portugese (Brazil)	62939	242926	3
	www.linkblog.com.br		Portugese (Brazil)	126705	290036	4
	meneame.net		Spanish	1148	1720	7
	www.mister-wong.es		Spanish	36917	42875	6
	www.yogrito.com		Spanish	99989	783848	0
	www.anotalo.com		Spanish	380488	162996	0
	www.digga.se		Swedish	56275	164906	5
	www.onzig.com		Romanian	139985	1784324	0
	www.toodoo.ru		Russian	30765	47408	6
	www.mister-wong.ru		Russian	82718	90931	6
	www.ntpy.com		Turkish	129659	2150994	3

* If you know of any non English bookmarking sites not in this list, please just leave a comment or contact us. We will then update the list accordingly.

** Alexa only collect traffic data to the main domain, whereas Backtags collects data to subdomains as well.

[...]

"Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Google. Alexa Is Useless"

This is the heading from Techcrunch's blog post from the 13 August and very disappointing. We have been avid follower of Techcrunch for at least 2 years but this is probably the worst researched article from Techcrunch we have come across for a long time. But then again the title is a drawcard for more visitors or was it written by an assistant and Michael Arrington just added his name.

It is true that the data from Alexa is not perfect, but neither is the data from Compete.com or Comscore.com. Labelling Compete.com as a newcomer is also beyond us seeing the company was launched in 2000. Worst of all is the fact that they are clearly comparing apples with pears in such an obvious manner that it actually hurts to read the article.

1. The Alexa data is based on a worldwide audience and both Compete and Comscore only use US data as a basis for their statistics.

2. The Alexa data is based on a trend, an order of magnitude, and not fixed numbers as is the case with Compete and Comscore.

Any analyst would prefer factual data, but then the data should be accurate. This is most certainly not the case with Compete and Comscore.

Compete.com indicates Google attracts around 110 million people = unique visitors per month who on average come back multiple times resulting in around 1.25 billion visits. On every visit they view on average 12 pages resulting in 15 billion page views.

Youtube has around 50 million people = unique visitors who also come back multiple times 300 million visits. On every visit they view on average 16 pages resulting in 4.8 billion page views.

This is a far cry from the 100 billion for Google and 16 billion for Youtube mentioned in the article by Techcrunch and determined by Comscore.

Now what on earth is the exact figure - they are orders of magnitude apart?

Another even simpler method to track trends is provided by Backtags.com. Backtags gathers data from Social Bookmarking sites and determines how often websites are being bookmarked by users.

There is a very simple philosophy behind this: "The more users bookmark a particular website, the more popular this site".Based on this data Backtags generates a ranking. Currently Youtube is t