startups, technology and fishing

I rant, Tony rants, Alan ranted.

With surprisingly similar space-time coordinates.

Our love of Facebook is duly recanted.

We’re no longer Zuckerberg’s subordinates.

Once upon a time I was a Facebook addict. It was an awesome way to reach out to people I haven’t been in contact with for years, share photos, update your status 80 times a day, etc. But Facebook apps are getting a little out of hand…

…and I’ve always hated that friend detail feature. </end rant>

Rob Malda (aka cmdrtaco), the founder of Slashdot.org has written a rather schizophrenic piece on Slashdot about Alexa. He spends most of the article beating up Alexa, but is sure to include 5 links to the website in the article - two of them specifically asking people to install the Alexa toolbar.

A while ago Digg passed Slashdot in traffic. (I’ve written about this before) An article covering the phenomenon got Dugg and thousands of Digg users clicked the link to Alexa and installed the Alexa toolbar. Notice the weird spike where the graphs meet. That skewed the Alexa results even further in Digg’s favor.

So now Slashdot looks even worse to journalists - most of whom are writing about Digg and calling Rob for background. Which is why Rob can’t help asking you to pretty please install the Alexa toolbar to make slashdot look good to journalists again.