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Rob Malda vs Alexa vs Slashdot vs Digg

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.

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My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.