Views from Medina Road

I'm not particularly aggressive about promoting Locus Online or obsessive about its usage statistics (since unlike Locus Magazine, Locus Online is remotely far from supporting anyone, however modestly), so when a couple days ago I stumbled upon a web search and ranking utility called Alexa, I had the suspicion that I'd belatedly discovered something that most netizens are already aware of. After all, there was Alexa already built into my IE toolbar (under Tools/Show Related Links). I just hadn't clicked it before.

Doing so, I found that it shows the traffic rank of whatever site currently in the browser. So of course.. well, here's a ranking of sites I frequently visit, or was curious about, without further comment. The only caveat is that Alexa ranks by domain name, not specific URL, so I can't discover, for example, what the rank of Bruce Sterling's blog is by itself (it's part of wired.com), nor can I parse Locus Online from the Locus Index to SF or the Index to SF Awards.

Yahoo, MSN, Google, Ebay, Microsoft: 1-5
CNN	24
BBC	28
NY Times	66
Blogspot	406
LA Times	761
Salon	942
Wired	981
The Onion	1872
Scifi.com	3293
Andrew Sullivan	8,020
Fictionwise	11,068
Arts & Letters Daily	12,316
Popdex	20,635
Boing Boing	21,346
PW	34,299
Locus Online	69,358
Neil Gaiman	82,844
Danny Yee	89,421
SF Site	103,937
SFWA	113,973
Electrolite/Making Light	134,582
Baen WebScription	162,999
SF Crowsnest	207,960
ISFDB	215,996
Asimov's	470,818
Strange Horizons	485,973
Analog	632,765
The Alien Online	772,354
The Infinite Matrix	785,366
Tangent Online	1,300,900