Dear All,
The Fat Birder Top 500 sit is a very useful site for tracking down
birding web sites, though it is not totally inclusive as it only lists
those sites which have installed the Top 500 meter on their site.
There are quite a few major sites that are not on the list, e.g. Birds
Australia, the IOC, the ABA (though the ABA Store site does get
listed" and AOU for example. One must regard the ratings as being as
reliable an indicator of popularity as, say, an "Age" or "Herald-Sun"
online poll. I have spent a bit of time going through the list, and I
have found some of the rankings curious, starting with number 2 which
is not even a true birding site, but that of a commercial nature &
wildlife stock photo library.
Meters such as the Fat Birder Top 500 can easily be 'jacked to boost
the ranking. All you have to do is open the home page, then click the
browsers back button, then the forward button, when the home page
opens, hit the back button again.... ad infinitum, with each click of
the forward button registering as a visit. It would probably be quite
easy to write a macro to do it for you and save wear and tear on your
fingers and keyboard. If you can get your friends, relatives, kids,
the dog etc., to use your site as their web browsers home page, all
the better, as every time they open the browser, click, another visit
recorded. There must be a history of meter 'jacking, as in the opening
page of the list, there is a request that "If you think that a site
that appears in these rankings is cheating or just doesn't qualify for
inclusion then please let us know and it will be removed"
I don't think John Penhallurick, should get too stressed about the
falling "ratings", after all, a meter application only counts visits
to the site, it does not record whether the site content is used or
not, nor does it measure the quality or usefulness of the site, and
John's site it is an excellent resource. I wouldn't worry about
popularity, after all, it is for the like of drones such as Paris
Hilton. Better to be useful than popular.
Keep up the good work John.
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
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www.birding-aus.org
birding-aus.blogspot.com
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