दरपन झूठ ना बोले. जो सच है तेरे सामने आये, हँस ले चाहे रो ले.

A website owner objected on my references to a site in the context of popularity. I promptly apologised. But he was not satisfied. He then asked me to remove all references to that site from my website.

Okay sir, feel happy. I removed all the references.

Today I am going to educate my visitors about the ranking business.

Rankings for a website have the same value circulation figures have for print media. Very often there is war of words with the quoted figures. You dispute it when they go against you. Fortunately there are lots and lots of ranking businesses on the net and they do their job in their own way. Some are good, some not so good.

So let us see where the differences arise:
Hits or visits are described by each ranking site or webanalyser in its own way and there is no uniform definition.
Some treat every call to the hosting server as a hit or visit. And some times there are hundreds of call on a single page!
Some treat each call to the server for all the pages visited as separate hits, further inflating the figures.
Whereas some treat a visit a single visit for all the pages visited within a specified time. Here the hits figure suddenly comes below!

Again there are disputes on the issue of visits and visitors. When someone visits a site at one go it is called one visit. If after a gap of some specified time that someone visits again it is called another visit. But the visitor is the same! So number of visitors is always lower than the number of visits.

Further complicating the process is the question of Absolutely Uique Visitors or People count. Absolutely Unique visitor is one visitor irrespective of how many times that visitor visits that site in agiven month! Naturally, Absolute Unique Visitors or the People Count is always lower than the number of visitors.

To give you an example for my own site, Anjoria.com, I am quoting data from Google Analytics.

For the last thirty days, i.e from 28th Nov 2007 to 28th Dec 2007 it was visited 1557 times by only 897 visitors. So the number of my vistors is only 897.

Of this many are bouncers, they come to my site by mistake and rapidly go away or do not open another page as they do not find anything interesting! So the real figure comes down again! During this period bounce rate was about 36%. So more than one third of my visitors go away without having a look on my site. This take the number of Absolute Unique Visitors to about 600. So only 600 people spread in the whole world visit Anjoria.com in a month and I have a position! Shame on me!

You see the whole document yourself.

But I am not ashamed. I am such a lousy person!

Some sites you can use to see and compare any site of your choice are given below:
Visit them if you want and see for yourself how correct or wrong I am.

दरपन झूठ ना बोले. जो सच है तेरे सामने आये, हँस ले चाहे रो ले.

The sites are:
Alexa
Quantcast
Compete
Sitebrain

In additon there are sites which require registration to view your data. I have a few of them with Anjoria. But you cannot see data for any other site.

So they have only one value that Anjoria is open with its data. I am ready to share, and am sharing these data with my visitors. Just click on the number of visitors shown on the pages of Anjoria.com and you will see for yourself all the data you want. As I dont have money to pay for these services, the data is limited to 200 visits only.

But then Anjoria is a small fry of the Bhojpuri world any one can crush it anyday with his might. Who says might is not right!

Bhojpuri is loosing its sheen….

……………..before it shined on the net!

It is a long long time that a new Bhojpuri website was added on the web. The last one in my knowledge was the RealBhojpuri.com. After that it has been a long period of silence. Even the Bhojpuri groups are going silent for days altogather.

When I tried to raise the issue of increasing awareness and use of Bhojpuri on the web, many people scoffed and said the situation is not so grim. Bhojpuri is popular on the web and the ranking provided by Alexa is biased in favour of firefox users. But no one cared to point out any other reliable third party source showing increasing popularity of Bhojpuri as a whole.

I dont care about Anjoria or BhojpuriAnjoria because in this universe their existence is not more than a peck of dust! Anjoria.com was started as a childish effort, of course as I have no knowledge of web, at least not of the class room variety. I looked around, asked for technical guidance almost in vain. But, when you desperately look for something you finally get it!

The real turned around came when I found Takhti -a wonderful software, absolutely FREE without any obligation. It helped me to overcome the problem of fonts. Many of the sites are still using images to publish in Devnagri!

Then another blessing came in disguise. I fell into finacial mess, had no job, no family, a few friends and nothing else. To overcome my mental depression I started concentrating on Anjoria. And the effort resulted in positive outcome. Out of the blue a noted Bhojpuri lover Dr.Ashok Dvivedi offered the contents of his famous print magazine "Paatee" to be used on Anjoria. A few writers emerged to help Anjoria with their articles. Thus a major problem of content was solved.

What still gives pain to me, is the lack of visitor participation. Visitors give a damn to whatever is being done. They fail to criticise, admire, appreciate, suggest anything. It results as a one way monologue where you go one speaking without caring what your listners want! I thought it was the non availabilty of Devnagri softwares so I asked them to write in Roman scripts. But hardly anyone cares to give feedback. This dampens the spirit and the tempo dies.

Recently, I am marking the downfall of hitherto popular websites. Even the most popular is gradually loosing its sheen! May I ask why?

Let us accept the fact. Bhojpuri film may be money spinning, Bhojpuri Songs with double meanings may top the charts, but Bhojpuri as a language and Bhojpuri websites are not going to become earning careers. If you love Bhojpuri, you have to go on writting, publishing from your own resources. You cannot make Bhojpuri websites financially viable when there is no popular backing.

As far as Anjoria is concerned, it will go on publishing it as long as it can. It asks only your feedbacks to keep it tuned to its visitors preferences.

What a shame?

I am becoming a ‘ranking addict’. There is a good business in ranking business. A lot of companies are in this business, some are free, some are paid. I am not going to talk about the paid sites. This is because I dont have money to spulrge neither you have that kind of interest. So just limit ourselves with free sites.

Let us start with Alexa. I have its widget on my site. It helps me to publish my rankings to my visitors from a third party which has no interest in my site or against my site. Therefore third party sites can be a better judge. Alexa collects web browsing info from its toolbar downloaded on willing participants and widgets on individual sites. Alexa clearly says that the data about those wibesites which have low visit is unreliable. And all of the Bhojpuri websites belong to this class!

Many people are understandably not happy with Alexa’s numbers. But third-party traffic stats are inherently inaccurate, particularly for smaller sites, where the number of web users in any sample is too small to have a good margin of error.

Then there is Quantcast. This has an American bias as majority of websites cater to American audience. Quantcast does not have enough information about Bhojpuri websites. They are such a low visit group, notwithstanding individual claims of millions of pageviews!

Another ranker site is Compete. This too has an American bias, and I am not complaining! To directly quote it, “We do not have any data for anjoria.com, so these are rough estimates.” - compete.com

People is defined by Compete.com as, “People Counts are also known as unique visitors - they only count a person once no matter how many times they visit a site in a given month. People Counts are typically used to determine how popular a site is”

Taking this people count or uniques as a standard my website Anjoria has about 600 to 800 absolute unique visitors per month. I get these info from several sources and all of these are in the same range.

Another information I gather from Quantcast is about the Anjoria Addicts. They constitute about 30% of its vistors. Google Analytics says about 50% of Anjoria visitors are old regulars. This is a better judgement on the usefulness of Anjoria for its visitors. A low amount of addicts or old visitors will show that Anjoria has nothing to hold them, whereas a high percentage of old visitors will show that its growth has peaked, or new visitors are not recruited.

But then I think, what a shame that a language spoken in all the continents of the world, a rare feature, with millions of Bhojpuri speakers scattered all around the globe having thousands of personal computers has such a low interest in its websites. Let us do one thing to popularise our language, visit a website of your choice everyday, see what it has to offer, whether it is live one, a static one, or a dead one. Blog on the net about Bhojpuri. Start reading writting and speaking in Bhojpuri. We must keep Bhojpuri alive by regularly using it.

You may say that what a hypocrisy! I am writting all these things in English, and that is with a purpose. Many of Bhojpurihas living in foreign land have low or negligible exposure to Bhojpuri. I am trying to reach them, convince them, and provoke them in using Bhojpuri.

Re-edited on 29th Dec 2007 as per request of a website owner.