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User Participation Score at Download.com = 0.0005% (or 1 in

After downloading the PDF reader Foxit Reader from Download.com, I got a nice reminder email to stop back and provide my rating.  I image most people Download.com visitors aren't registered, so most don't rate the products.

In fact, out of 636,221 downloads of Foxit Reader, only 31 people have left a rating.  That means that just 1 person out of every 20,523 downloads left a rating, or 0.0005%.  You can see the user feedback here.

That's not a lot, but it's better than nothing.  And Download.com is still the best site to go for software downloads.   In any case, here is a case for a new experimental metric, the User Participation Score (UPS).  For Download.com, we could give it a score of 0.0005% based on this once case.

Now, in the practical world, Download.com could work on increasing their User Participation Score (UPS).  Some thoughts:

• The only people who would register at Download.com are those who really, really, really want to share feedback (like me).
• Download.com needs to give visitors a reason to register.  One somewhat diabolical way would be to require all downloaders to register.  Makes sense.  Download.com is providing a service after all.  But then again, they could just insert an offer to register in the download process.
• The holy grail is social features.  It would be great to find people similar to you.  At the very least, let me see user profiles and what they downloaded and voted on.

Introducing the Slut-O-Meter

Slut-O-Meter is an interesting site that shows how "slutty" different search terms are.  While I don't like the name, I do find the results interesting.  Each search phrase is given a rating from 0% (not slutty) to 100% (slutty) based on the percent of search results that are filtered out by Google's SafeSearch for Kids.  Here are some results, from least slutty to most slutty.  You'll note that Yahoo is the "least slutty" while Paris Hilton is the "most slutty".

Yahoo (2%)
Jesse Jackson (6%)
Google (7%)
SquirrelNet (8%)
Disney (13%)
Tom Cruise (28%)
Michael Jackson (36%)
Jessica Alba (48%)
Britney Spears (53%)
Pamela Anderson (81%)
Paris Hilton (84%)

Thanks to SearchEngineWatch for the tip.

Digg is NOT bigger than Slashdot (but is bigger than Slashdot.org)

UPDATE:  The info below is sort of correct, but per Jon's comment below, my intended message is incorrect.  The truth is that Slashdot (which is really Slashdot.org, not .com) is #853, putting it still ahead of Digg. 

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(Original post)

According to Netcraft, Digg is the 1,943-ranked site in terms of traffic, compared to a 19,593 ranking for Slashdot.  While it's true that Digg is still ranked higher for Alexa, that's just a sign that Digg users don't download and install the Alexa toolbar.

Alexa does rank more sites than Netcraft, but Netcraft is more accurate on the sites it does rank.  For example, Alexa ranks a Disney Antenna Ball Collection site 4,572,690th, while Netcraft ranks the site's traffic as "unknown".

How people's eye track when using Google

When using Google, people tend to look at the top-left portion
of the screen.  Hat tip to Jottings.com which terms this Google's Golden Triangle.