I admit it - I’m addicted to Alexa. Through data gathered by their Internet Explorer toolbar, Alexa attempts to rank the popularity of web sites along various metrics. Tech pundits love to point to Alexa stats when drinking the Kool Aid of their web 2.0 site of the week - or calling for a site death watch. Two great recent examples are Digg vs. Slashdot and Flickr vs. Webshots. It’s a bit like sizing up boxers before a fight just by the numbers, genesis of the the famous saying “the tale of the tape”.

While many people argue that Alexa stats are crap, I think they’re valuable given you bear a few points in mind:

1. Don’t take Alexa out of context. Alexa has a narrow but deep window into web usage, i.e. extrapolating Windows IE users with Alexa toolbars out to a general web population. While they’ve got a great volume of data to play with (especially if they leverage Amazon’s usage numbers), don’t assume Alexa’s numbers reflect reality. On the other hand, it is quite reasonable to compare two sites’ Alexa ranks over the medium to long-term if they have a similar focus, audience demographic, international footprint, etc.
2. Until a site reaches a certain traffic level (rank over 40,000?), Alexa just doesn’t have enough data to be accurate. One user can skew stats at this level.
3. Obsessing daily over your own site rank is useless. I’ve seen Wikispaces stats fluctuate wildly on a daily and weekly basis when our internal numbers show nothing of the sort. Watch for long term trends instead.
4. Never confuse a site’s Alexa rank with its chances of business success. Much like the diameter of a heavyweight fighter’s bicep isn’t a great indicator of who will win the fight, Alexa’s tale of the tape says absolutely nothing about a site’s actual value to its users.

With these points in mind, I’ll periodically post Alexa-isms that catch my eye. First up: Squidoo’s first six months.

I’ve started to see some good sparkline traction lately, especially alongside blogs. Happily, many of these make use of the Sparkline PHP Library I cobbled together after seeing Edward Tufte’s seminar in 2004.

Yesterday, I stumbled on Sean McBride’s excellent SparkStats plugin for WordPress 2.0. A minute later, and zap - posting and comment stats are now in my sidebar. Thanks Sean!

Many more example uses are on the Sparkline library wiki but I suspect there are a lot more out there. If you’ve seen sparklines out in the wild, please add them to the list.

I have a confession to make. This isn’t my first blog post, it’s my second. The first one was right about when Google bought Pyra Labs for their Blogger service. For those of you keeping track, that was just about three years ago. Suffice it to say, my first attempt didn’t take.

At the time, I was working at VA Software as Director of Engineering for the SourceForge enterprise product. As the engineering team grew, I spent less and less time with my hands dirty in technology and more time in product design and development process. (My last big commit to CVS was to update the year in a bunch of comments from 2002 to 2003. Touching nearly every file gave me a nice bump in our commit stats. :)) I have no real desire to write about personal stuff, and back then I didn’t feel strongly about writing about technology.

Fast forward three years. I’m knee-deep in the construction and day-to-day operation of Wikispaces, a free wiki host. Along with Adam and Dom, I’m one of three employees at our start-up, Tangient LLC. There’s a massive growth of the kind of consumer web properties that really spark my interest. I’ve got an increasingly long list of ideas and topics that someone else might possibly want to read about. So, I’m giving blogging a second try.

I’ll likely keep things confined to a few areas: Wikispaces and how we’re growing the service, the tools and technologies that make modern sites tick, new services of particular interest, and notes on my fascination with Alexa stats. Seriously.

But don’t worry - if I start posting about what the cats ate last night, some trippy experience I had while riding Muni, or rants on politics, I’ve instructed several friends to break all of my fingers.

We’ll see how it goes.