In November, I wrote about the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem and compared it to Technorati, which is still a much more meaningful indicator of Blog Popularity.

When I wrote about Blogs yesterday, I got an e-mail making the point that big group blogs such as "The Daily Kos" occassionally ended up with a higher Alexa rating than big news magazines.

Now Kos is actually pretty popular, but less of a blog than say Instapundit or a Group Blog that's much more defined to a certain number of contributors. Regardless, I have to say Alexa rankings are not a good measure of a blog or website.

A site's Alex Rankings is based on the number of users of the Alexa Tool Bar who visit a website. Now a lot of people, myself included don't want an Alexa Toolbar or any other browser. So, they're not counted in the Alexa Rankings.

I'll give you one good example of how Alexa doesn't measure traffic.

Radicalruss is ranked 895,569

Adam's Blog is ranked 1,358,020

Now, you'd expect Russ to have more traffic than I do. Lets take a look at our SiteMeter Hit counters and compare, as we both have them on the blog:

Adam's Blog: 9000 + visits since November 14th
Radical Writ: 32,000 + in 2005

If we calculate this out for the whole year, we see I'd end up with about twice the traffic as Russ, but I'm ranked 500,000 spots lower. This isn't meant to pick on Russ, just make the point that Alexa is really not accurate. Earlier on when my traffic was down, I lead Russ by several million spots. Alexa rankings mean nothing, though its nice if you have a high one so you can brag about it.