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Mac Chick of The Month

Alexa’s Sparky toolbar finally let’s Mac users have a voice on the web

June 18, 2008 by Dr. Macenstein
Filed under: Apple Fanboyism, Awesomeness, News

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ATTENTION MAC USERS! STAND UP AND BE COUNTED! Download Alexa Sparky 1.2.1 and let your Mac freak flag fly!

For years, Alexa.com has been used as the primary source for website traffic ratings on the internet. Alexa’s rankings are often used to not only to rank a site’s popularity, but as a tool by advertisers to determine advertising rates. The downside to this is that until now, only PC users could install the Alexa toolbar on their Internet Explorer browser, thus skewing the traffic rankings for Mac websites (such as ours) as only those readers who visited our site on a PC had a chance to have their visit noticed by Alexa. Well, we are happy to say that Alexa has released a new Mac-compatible version of their Sparky toolbar for Firefox, and now you can finally let the world know which sites you think are worth reading! (One of which is obviously OURS!)

Installation is easy, and when done, you will be presented with an ugly graph in the bottom right corner of your browser when surfing.

This graph represents the overall traffic for the site you are visiting in recent months. Along side that graph is the site’s current ranking number. You can actually turn off the display of the graph and ranking number to clean up your browser window if you’d like, but I actually find it fun to click around and see what my favorite sites are ranked (and see what other Mac sites we’re beating!). As you can see, Macenstein.com currently ranks a respectable 46,597th out of all the billions of sites out there â€“Â not horrible given our rather narrow focus and the fact that only our PC-readers were counted, but there is definitely room for improvement there. We’re confident once all our dozens of readers download the new Alexa toolbar, that number will skyrocket to number 3 in about a month or so.

Using Sparky is easy, as once it is installed, you do not need to do anything else, simply surf as you normally do, and Sparky will tell Alexa which sites you like and visit frequently.

Above: If you like the site you’re visiting, Alexa lets you quickly find similar sites via the the “Related Links” menu item.

Now, as much as we would love you guys to install Sparky 1.2.1 and then click through all 1400 posts on our site, there is a more real, “global” benefit to installing and using Sparky â€“Â namely, that now the Mac community as a whole has a chance to have an effect on the internet, and this will benefit ALL Apple websites, not just Macenstein. So, if you are a Firefox user, take 40 seconds out of your life and download Sparky 1.2.1, and get surfing!

[via digitalapplejuice]

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