Tuesday, May 29, 2007

in 1997 by Jakob Nielsen.

Zipf Distribution (power law) of Website Popularity (Alertbox Sidebar): "Much available data suggests that Web use follows a Zipf distribution. The figure shows the distribution of incoming page requests to www.sun.com during a one-month period last year. Each datapoint represents one page, with the x-axis showing pages sorted according to popularity: the first page is the most popular one (the home page), the second page is the one that received second-most requests that month, and so on until we reach page number 10,000 which was only requested a single time that month. The heavy line shows the actual empirical data from the log files and the thin red line shows a Zipf curve that seems to fit the data quite well except for the low end. The deviation at the low end is due to a variety of factors, including the fact that the site is not old enough yet to have enough accumulated pages of low-frequency interest."

Monday, May 14, 2007

ads on RootsWeb

RootsWeb Newsroom

Annoying Ads on RootsWeb

May 14th, 2007 by Jamie

Over the past couple of days, we’ve heard a lot of concern about blinking or flashing ads on RootsWeb that are annoying and even potentially dangerous to those susceptable to seizures or migranes. We agree that these advertisements have no place on RootsWeb and we’ve been working with the ad folks to remove them all.

If you see a flashing or offensive ad anywhere on RootsWeb, please report it to the HelpDesk. Make sure that you include a general description of the advertisement and the text that is on the ad so that we’re sure that we remove them all.

Thanks for your patience and understanding and for helping us identify and nix all of these bad advertisements.