What is ://URLFAN?

://URLFAN is an evolving experiment designed to discover what websites the blogosphere is discussing all in real time. It does this by cultivating the content of thousands of RSS feeds and parsing billions of pieces of information.

Now every website owner can see who's talking about their site in real time and how they compare to every other site on the Internet. There are many sites designed to rank the "traffic" of a website, such as Alexa, however ://URLFAN is different. We rank sites according to their popularity in the fast moving and growing world of RSS feeds.

Unlike Alexa, there is no approximating in our ranking system since we're using concrete data to generate the results. Some important factors to note when using Alexa, according to their disclaimer : Alexa only measures sites visited by Internet Explorer, overcounts sites like Amazon, and only counts sites visited by surfers using Windows. You can probably guess that as the web shifts from IE/Win setups to competing browers and operating systems, a more accurate way to to measure popularity is needed.

The longer we're able to gather data the more accurate ://URLFAN will become. We hope this will provide publishers with a useful tool in tracking their sites and how their content is referenced by other websites.