Category Archives: Public

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Alexaholic

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The recent FastCompany mentioned alexaholic.com, and that led to an interesting half hour of experimentation … The site takes up to five domain names and builds a graph showing their web traffic.

AAUW.org, LWV.org, BPWusa.org, NOW.org, Feminist.org — interesting to see all the traffic is fairly low, but LWV had an enormous spike around the election.

WordPress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com (easy sign-up blogging platforms) — WordPress is overtaking TypePad, but Blogger is much larger than the two combined.

WordPress.org, Drupal.org, Joomla.org, Plone.org, Mamboserver.org (content management systems that may be appropriate for branch/state web sites) – Joomla has consistently the most traffic, except for a WordPress spike shortly after the release of WordPress 2.1 in January. Drupal and WordPress run neck and neck, but all three are the same order of magnitude. Mambo and Plone were in the pack until mid-2006, when, if you can believe the graphs really say anything, the other three took off while they’ve gradually declined to an order of magnitude less traffic. Now for open source software, web site traffic can be a measure of the size and engagement of the community, so Joomla may be worth another look.

LinkedIn.com, Zoominfo.com (both kinda “corporate” networking sites) vs. Myspace.com and Facebook.com — MySpace is far and away the winner. My impression of LinkedIn as “MySpace for grownups” may be misleading since MySpace also has blog and web-building features, so the comparisons here may not really be fair.

Web 2.0 and AAUW

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From a discussion of Web 2.0 on the NTEN discussion list, Beth Kanter referred to this post that described the use of a card game to have a community discuss various Web 2.0 tools (leave aside for a moment what that means). Now I met David Wilcox several years ago (through Terry Grunwald and RTPnet) and saw their version of the game for community technology issues, and I’ve recently connected with Beth Kanter (the co-presenter of this game) through another NTEN list.

If you’re wondering about how to introduce Web 2.0 tools (or if you even just want a list of what some of them are), take a look at the game. It might make for an interesting workshop — though I expect it’d need to be a carefully recruited audience.

On another note, as one of the commenters said, one needs to be careful about putting the tools first, instead of defining the problems that the tools might solve. But I find myself spending a lot of time trying to get across “what’s possible” — getting from where we are to where we need to be will require big shifts, and part of the shift will be increased fluency with a number of tools so that it’s increasingly common to choose the right one naturally to solve whatever problem is at hand.

Workshop in 2008, anyone?