In addition, Alexa is currently heading the ratings for the best free statistics provider. It is the best available. If a better one turns up, we would switch. Those criticising the ratings often base their criticism by placing faith in their own website statistics, which are often inferior. That, and they are humorless wretches.

Jim – The decision was originally made to exclude the Biblioblog Top 50 from the stats, and then it was pointed out that other ‘meta-biblioblogs’ such as biblioblogs.com are included. So, for consistency, and to provide full information, the Biblioblog Top 50 has been included. The ratings were probably higher this month for the Top 50 site, because of the advertising received from John Hobbins’ blog.

Sincerely,
Ramesh Patel

As for Alexa–yeah, my understanding is that Alexa tracks stats via the use of their toolbar. As you can imagine, this hardly produces a representative sample of Internet users. A quick Google search will give you more information on the matter than you really want. What this means for the biblioblogosphere is that most of the hits to a site aren’t tracked via Alexa. If you don’t use their toolbar, you don’t count.

While I’m all for coming up with a homegrown (and locally coded) solution, the problem with creating a software counter is coming up with one that would be allowed on all the different hosting sites on which bibliobloggers dwell.

For example, many of use are being hosted by WordPress, and they tend to be quite Spartan in the code they allow.

Of course, as John points out, there isn’t a better system at the moment–other than perhaps creating a counter software of some type and having blogs “opt in” by placing the biblioblog top 50 counter on their blog somewhere. If it was done right, the counter could even distinguish between unique hits and returning viewers.