Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist

Archive forJuly 28th, 2004 | back to home

28 July 2004

Danah Boyd says she’ll double her contribution to Kerry if ten readers contribute by tomorrow.

I’m not crazy about Kerry (as a “recent posting”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_us.html#001180 might indicate) but I don’t think he’d be a bad president and I think it would be catastrophic for the US and for the world if we had another four years of Bush in the White House.

I am one of those who has decided to donate as a result (and I already donated once earlier). If Bush does get in I don’t want to have thought I could have done more to stop him. It depresses me that my most important vote is the one I make with my wallet but that seems to be the way American politics has gone.

If you are at all motivated to join me please do so and let her know. And do it soon – tomorrow is the last day you can donate!

P.S. It’s annoying that the Kerry site seems to believe you have to be a US resident to donate (the online form insists on a zip code). Don’t they want my money? There is no legal reason I can’t donate as far as I know (I am an American citizen, though I don’t boast much about it these days).

Microsoft Watch has created a Web ranking tool which brings together various publicly-available ways of assessing the popularity of a given page – Google’s PageRank, Alexa’s traffic rank and a count of total external backlinks from Yahoo (which reports these much better than Google apparently).

None of these are very precise measures but they are the only ones available for sites that are not big enough to turn up in commercial surveys of web popularity as far as I know – anyone got any better ones? Come to that are there any easy ways to get at some of the site popularity data produced by people like “Comscore”:http://www.comscore.com/ without paying them commercial rates?