Alexa Toolbar
For the past couple months I’ve had the Alexa toolbar installed on my computer. On one level it’s a powerful tool for anyone looking to get ad revenue for their blogs or who is networking via social media to expand their audience.
That said, the Alexa toolbar can fundamentally change the way you work on the internet and perhaps even the way you ‘deal’ with people. Basically, the toolbar shows a numerical ranking of every page you visit. It’s all based on traffic. Google is #1. Your brother’s law office website is #23,308,088.
Suddenly you start feeling sorry for people’s blogs. You visit a page like the American Poetry Review and wonder how your relatively crappy blog has a higher rank.
As an example of the effect of Alexa rankings, I’m going to add today’s Alexa rank to the rest of the items listed in this article.