Currently ranking the popularity of 3,783,534 websites by parsing 302,023,552 blog posts from 5,948,937 blog feeds.
://URLFAN ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. Unlike analytics services like Alexa or Compete, ://URLFAN doesn’t measure website traffic. It’s similar to Technorati, only ://URLFAN ranks all websites and not just blogs.

# 1. en.wikipedia.org

# 2. youtube.com

# 3. flickr.com

# 4. twitter.com

# 5. google.com

# 6. facebook.com

# 7. myspace.com

# 8. imdb.com

# 9. nytimes.com

# 10. apple.com

# 11. vimeo.com

# 12. washingtonpost.com

# 13. technorati.com

# 14. tinyurl.com

# 15. cnn.com

# 16. microsoft.com

# 17. news.yahoo.com

# 18. gmail.com

# 19. wordpress.org

# 20. online.wsj.com

www.urlfanx.com

‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#1.	en.wikipedia.org	131,622	1 hour ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#2.	youtube.com	119,744	44 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#3.	flickr.com	115,775	19 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#4.	twitter.com	83,881	37 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#5.	google.com	55,248	22 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#6.	facebook.com	47,559	11 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#7.	myspace.com	47,222	47 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#8.	imdb.com	42,753	1 hour ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#9.	nytimes.com	41,935	31 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#10.	apple.com	33,628	55 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#11.	vimeo.com	32,154	56 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#12.	washingtonpost.com	29,160	31 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#13.	technorati.com	27,795	48 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#14.	tinyurl.com	27,540	51 minutes ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#15.	cnn.com	26,730	2 hours ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#16.	microsoft.com	24,789	2 hours ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#17.	news.yahoo.com	22,682	1 hour ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#18.	gmail.com	22,706	1 hour ago
‘);return false” vspace=”3″ border=”0″ hspace=”3″>	#19.	wordpress.org	22,068	54 minutes ago
	#20.	online.wsj.com

The scale of a phishing attack originally thought to be directed at Hotmail may be larger than previously thought.

BBC News has seen a list of more than 20,000 more names and passwords that have been posted online.

The list contains e-mail addresses and passwords from Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other service providers.

The list was published on the same website as the original list of 10,000 Hotmail login details.

Some of the accounts appear to be old, unused or fake. However, BBC News has confirmed that many – including Gmail and Hotmail addresses – are genuine.

Other addresses include Comcast and Earthlink accounts.

It is not clear whether the list was part of the same phishing attack that collected the Hotmail addresses or a separate scam.

Phishing involves using fake websites to lure people into revealing details such as bank account details or login names.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said phishing was an “industry-wide problem”.

“Our guidance to customers is to exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links from both known and unknown sources, and that they install and regularly update their anti-virus software.”

Password change

Technology blog neowin.net was the first to publish details of the original attack. It said the accounts were posted on 1 October to pastebin.com, a website commonly used by developers to share code.

The Pastebin website is currently down for maintenance.

Its owner, Paul Dixon, posted a note on the site in the wake of neowin’s revelations saying that it had received “an unprecedented amount of traffic“.

“Pastebin.com is just a fun side project for me, and today it’s not fun. It will remain offline all day while I make some further modifications,” he said.

Security expert Graham Cluley of Sophos advised users to change their passwords as soon as possible.

“I’d also recommend that people change the password on any other site where they use it,” he said.

About 40% of people use the same password for every website they use, he added.

news.bbc.co.uk

England’s World Cup qualifier in Ukraine on Saturday will be shown exclusively live to subscribers on the internet who will pay at least £4.99.

All previously broadcast England matches have been available on TV.

Kentaro – an international agency appointed by the Ukrainian Football Federation – originally sold the UK rights for the game to Setanta.

But after the pay-TV firm collapsed, digital sport specialist Perform was appointed to stream the match online.

The match will be shown on the website www.ukrainevengland.com and viewers will be able to subscribe to it using PayPal, the electronic payment service.

England have already qualified for the 2010 World Cup, winning all eight of their group matches. It is understood none of the traditional broadcasters were willing to pay the asking price to screen the game, which kicks off at 1715 BST.

But the news has angered supporters who want to watch the action on television.

Peter Silverstone, managing director of Kentaro, told BBC Sport: “You will watch as you would any other streaming on the internet, like YouTube or the BBC iPlayer – there will be a pop-up player that will show the match in a very good quality stream.”

Former England boss Sven-Goran Eriksson is part of the studio team for the match, while Kentaro has promised “a top commentary team”.

The cost of watching the game was being advertised on Monday in the Daily Express as £4.99 if viewers signed up before midnight on Wednesday.

Charges rise to £9.99 for those who subscribe on Thursday and Friday, and £11.99 on Saturday.

Similar prices were advertised on the website of the Daily Telegraph, which promised a “high-quality stream available on Mac and PC“.

Silverstone insisted the project was “commercially viable”.

“We have a huge marketing effort behind us with the various newspaper groups that will promote the match on their websites,” he said.

“Commercially this will work and genuinely offers an exciting opportunity for us. We wouldn’t embark on this project if we didn’t feel it had strategic long-term value, this isn’t a one-off shot.”

Silverstone said Kentaro would take a maximum of one million subscribers for the match – which he said equates to about 2.5 million viewers – because this would be the “safe number to stop at to ensure the optimal broadcast“.

The Odeon cinema chain will show the game live at 11 venues around the country, including at their flagship cinema at Leicester Square, but the match will not be available in pubs.

Football Association spokesman Adrian Bevington admitted: “We would obviously like to see the game broadcast to as many people as possible” but insisted the matter was out of his organisation’s hands.

“These are the rights of the Ukrainian FA and the agents they’ve appointed to sell them,” he told BBC Sport.

“A traditional TV platform would be ideal to broadcast the game but it’s not the case. It’s not in our control.”ITV has the rights to home England games and, under the terms of their contract, has taken over Setanta’s broadcast rights for away friendlies.

However, that aspect of the deal does not cover away qualifying games, and neither the BBC, ITV, Sky nor Channel Five made a successful bid for the match.

Perform streamed Manchester City and Spurs matches in the Uefa Cup last year when a TV deal could not be agreed – charging about £4 per game – and Bevington insisted: “We’re obviously confident in the company that has got the rights – they’re a very professional company“.

However, travelling England fan Mark Perryman said the fact the match was available only on the internet was “disastrous and an outrage.”

“A World Cup qualifier should be available for everybody on free-to-air TV,” Perryman told BBC Sport.

“It seems to me there’s a very simple solution – Fifa and Uefa should insist as a condition of entry that all nations sell their games to terrestrial stations, whether its the home or away market.”

England defender Rio Ferdinand said he thought the broadcasting of the match marked “a good step forward” though.

“I read that online advertising has taken over from TV, so that tells you something about where it’s going in terms of the digital world,” he told BBC Sport.

“So I’m sure it’ll be the way forward and in the future it’ll probably be the reality. I think it’s a good way to gauge how many people are interested.”

And Andrew Croker, executive chairman of Perform, insisted England fans would “embrace” the internet broadcast.

“I think consumers are pretty sophisticated now, particularly in the UK, where we have been in the vanguard of adopting new technology,” he told BBC Sport.

“I think people want a choice – the chance to watch football in a different way. This is pioneering, very exciting and I think people will enjoy it.”

news.bbc.co.uk

“Begun” will be the only advertising system on ru.yahoo.com. Financial and other details of the transaction or “Begun“, or Yahoo! not reveal.

According to the newspaper, formerly a partnership with Yahoo! discussed Yandex, the largest owner in RuNet content network Yandex.Direct. The deal did not materialize – the parties agreed that the audience ru.yahoo.com, consisting of expatriates, unattractive for Russia advertisers.

“Begun” – the second largest player in Russia’s market of contextual advertising. His ads displayed on the portals of Rambler, Mail.ru, a social network Odnoklassniki.ru on blog LiveJournal, the site “Афиша” and other major resources.

lenta.ru

“Most customers are not very skillful when it comes to searching for information on the web.” says SafeComs Bernard Collin, a 20 year veteran in the field. “Potential customers will spend a few minutes, at most, looking for a product or service. If your website isn’t listed on the first screen, chances are a competitor who invested in Search Engine Optimization will get the business.”

“SEO offers tangible, measurable benefits to your business.”

If you have only recently heard about SEO, don’t feel left out. The constant pressure on companies to be ever more competitive is driving the search for new Internet technologies to extend their reach and to have more impact in the marketplace. Bernard predicts that, “We are going to see websites without effective SEO fall farther down the rankings very quickly over the next few years.”

Great return on investment
SEO could be the best investment you make in your website. It’s estimated that 15 percent of all sales in the Thai economy are now completely online. For 90 percent of the people using the Internet, search engines like Google and Yahoo are how they find what they are looking for. Of those people, 85 percent never look farther than the bottom of page two of the search results, and 77% never click on paid or sponsored ads.

SEO offers tangible, measurable benefits to your business. The first, and perhaps most important, is that SEO helps more potential customers find your site. It’s working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and can give your products and services a high international profile for a comparatively low cost.

“Google search engines rank sites by how often other sites link to you, not by the content on your site.”

On the technical side, a well optimized site will work with all World Wide Web compliant browsers, which means your site can be viewed by the greatest potential number of visitors. SEO also ensures that all your links are working correctly and that all the pages in your site are accessible to search engines, which makes your site easy to index. What this means is that visitors to our site have a much more enjoyable experience, which encourages them to come back for more.

Making the grade: Getting listed on the first page of search results
While not exactly new, SEO has become an increasingly important factor in website impact. Simply put, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a way of getting internet search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing to list your website near the top of the list it displays in response to whatever keywords a potential customer types into the search box. Sounds simple enough. But remember, you are competing with thousands, perhaps millions of websites that may be using the same or similar key words.

“When a visitor opens your website, it should immediately be clear what you want them to do”

First, you need to understand a little about search engines and how they rank those 100 million websites. A ‘search engine’ is just a fancy name for a set of computer programs that search an index or master list of websites and returns matches to the specified keywords. According to Nielsen NetRatings, the most popular search engines by market share are Google, Yahoo and MSN. Exactly how that works isn’t important; what’s important is how a search engine ranks your website within an index. Google search engines rank sites by how often other sites link to you, not by the content on your site, They do of course use content to determine whether your site is relevant to the keywords in the search, but more about that later. The point is, the higher your site ranking, the more likely customers are to find your website quickly and start looking at your content.

High ranking; the first step
Bernard cautions website owners, “There is a difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. SEO helps get you website to the top of the search engine ranks. That’s an important first step. If visitors don’t immediately see good information, well written copy, great visuals and easy navigation, they very quickly move on to the next website, and you’ve lost a potential sale. SEO helps potential customers find your site, SEM helps ensure they actually look at your pages and transform in customers. This means well organized, high quality content, good writing and an easy flow leading to a purchase. “It’s the basic principle of good sales,” says Bernard. “When a visitor opens your website, it should immediately be clear what you want them to do, like download a test version or a white paper or send an email to get more info or click on the buy button. SEM ensures there is a flow from finding your site on the search engine to transforming a visitor into a customer. You need both for an effective website.”

Boost your website ranking
Getting a high ranking for your website is not rocket science, but it does take some work. The theory is simple enough if you pay attention to a few simple guidelines.

Do not do-it-yourself

The bookstores, and the Internet itself, are full of do-it-yourself website design guides. They all tell you how easy it is and how you can have your website up and running in no time at all at little or no cost whatsoever! That’s fine if your website is a family photo album or your passion for Dutch tulip bulbs. If you have sales targets to reach, you need a professional design team. “Website design and search engine technology has got to the point where a single individual can no longer master all the skill sets needed to construct an effective website, “says SafeComs Bernard Collin. A professional website design team needs, at minimum, a graphic designer, a copywriter, and a programmer who understands the numerous technical ins-and-outs of exciting and mysterious topics like domain name registration, hosting, HTML, meta tags, spiders, Cascading Style Sheets and Search Engine Optimization.

Provide quality content. People who shop on the Internet want solid information, not advertising bumpf. “People don’t read web pages,” says Bernard Collin, SafeComs SEO expert, “they scan a page looking for keywords.” Good copywriting can increase reader attention by over 100 per cent. “On a web page, less is more,” advises Bernard.

Focus on the goal. The goal of SEO is to bring new customers to your website. It is not about getting every possible keyword listed in a search engine index. “Many people try to get as many high search engine rankings as possible,” says SafeComs Bernard Collin. “It’s not important that your website is listed for a lot of keywords; it’s important that your site is listed for the right keywords.” Pick the wrong keywords and all your efforts are wasted.

Use effective keywords. ‘Effective’ key words are words that potential customers are most likely to use. This is where SEO really makes a difference, because it isn’t possible to guess what thousands of potential customers might be thinking when they sit down to do a search. The term ‘keyword’ is actually misleading. As Bernard explains, “Hardly anyone uses single keywords anymore. Nearly 30 percent of all searches use 2-word phrases, another 30 percent use 3-word phrases, and about 20 percent use 4-word phrases. “Getting the right keywords is just the beginning,” says Bernard. A critical aspect of optimizing your website is gathering and analyzing user statistics. For this, an SEO professional like SafeComs will use tracking tools that will tell you not just how many people visited your site, but who they are, where they are, how they found your site, what search engine they are using, how your site performs compared with other web sites in the same category or country and lots more useful information. SEO uses this information to fine tune your keywords so you know which keywords lead to sales and which are just taking up space. This can push your ranking up another notch or two, more than enough to make the difference between a miss and a live customer contact.

“A fully optimized website is no guarantee that your site will retain its rank forever.”

Create convincing web pages. If you don’t have web pages that appeal to potential customers through quality visuals and brilliant copy, visitors don’t become customers. That’s why you need the graphic designer and the copywriter. Here are some simple guidelines for creating effective web pages:

• Use a Plain English writing style and the minimum number of words necessary to get your message across
• Use Cascading Style Sheets for layout, avoid using Frames
• Use page titles that describe page content
• Use lots of headings and sub-headings
• Write an opening paragraph that summarizes page content

Link or die

“Search engines are constantly evolving.” says SafeComs Bernard Collin. “A fully optimized website is no guarantee that your site will retain its rank forever.” From the day the World Wide Web took form, people started looking for ways to manipulate their rankings. The cat-and-mouse game continues, which means that search engines are constantly developing increasingly sophisticated methods to rank pages. “You have to understand the mathematical algorithms and keep pace with new developments and trends to keep your ranking at or near the top,” says Bernard. “it’s a never-ending learning curve.”

One of the big factors these days is the number of links into and from your website pages. Suppose, for example, your company sells an exciting new fire fighting technology. If you put links on your website pages that connect to websites for fire fighting associations, municipalities using your product, and sites for international fire safety standards, that’s going to be very good for your ranking. If those sites put your website address on their pages, that’s going to be really fantastic for your ranking!

Why are links so important? Because most search engine designers feel that when one page links to another page, it’s like casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important that vote is. Search engines calculate a numeric value or PageRank that reflects the importance of a page based on the number of votes cast for it. PageRank isn’t the only factor that search engines use to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Today, search engines incorporate a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different factors, information it guards closely. The trend in ranking algorithms these days is toward factors such as the age, sex, location, and search history of people conducting searches. “Effective SEO is no a hobby,” says Bernard Collin. “Professional SEO practitioners invest a great deal of time participating in online forums and attending conferences, workshops and seminars to keep pace with developments in search engine technology.”

Good versus bad SEO
SEO practitioners talk about ‘white hat’ SEO and ‘black hat’ SEO. No mention of magic wands, at least not yet. White hat techniques are about creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible. Black hat SEO uses deception to trick search engines into giving them a high rank. White hat techniques tend to produce results that last a long time. Black hat SEO works on the principle that a site will eventually be banned, either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

“Successful search engine optimization for international markets often requires professional translation of web pages.”

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rank or by banning them altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review. Don’t think it doesn’t happen! In 2006, Google removed both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany websites for using deceptive practices. Both companies quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list. If you are tempted to use tricks, keep in mind that both those companies have lots of clout and lots of lawyers.

Expand your market
If your market is international, you need SEO that takes this into account. Search engine market share varies from one country to another. Google is currently the US market and overall world market leader with about 85%, followed by Yahoo and MSN. In markets outside the US, Google’s share is often larger. In Thailand, Google claims 98% of the search engine market. In Russia, local search engine Yandex has 50% of the paid advertising revenue, while Google has less than 9%. In China, Baidu leads in market share, although Google has been gaining. Successful search engine optimization for international markets often requires professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hosting that provides a local IP address. A good SEO company should be able to advise you on these matters.

Be on top
According to the latest survey, as of August 2008, there were 176,748,506 websites on the Internet. How do potential customers find your site before they find a competitor? Search Engine Optimization is the key advantage.

SEO is a positive, proactive step you can take to help ensure that potential customers see your website on the search results page before they see a site offering the same or similar products and services.

SafeComs Bernard Collin advises people interested in SEO that, “Search Engine Optimization is not a just a technical solution, it has to be part of your overall marketing and communications strategy and include effective SEM as well. In terms of return on investment, it’s hard to think of anything that gives you a bigger ‘bang for your buck’ than SEO.”

www.safecoms.com

Use the service can be any resource. To do this, place the site search form – ready to code. There is no need to deal with any coding or configuration of additional software. A search results will automatically appear on the site in the domain, ie. users will not go away from resource.

In order to get money for the visitor clicks on your ad blocks, the webmaster should make a site to РСЯ – Yandex Advertising Network. To do so, comply with multiple rules, the main of which are as follows:

* Daily audience of the site should not be less than 300 people
* Site must be placed on the paid hosting

In the event that the site will be taken in РСЯ, its owner will receive half the profit from clicks on ads.

www.e-generator.ru

But this is not rocket science, right? How could this service become so popular by doing just one simple thing (matching good content with relevant ads)? Well we must take a closer look at the BSA ecosystem to clear things out. So we have a bunch of websites with great content (more than 2.000 actually), and some advertisers (over 200) that want their ads to be viewed by the right target. Now add to the equation the facts that more than half of the BSA system actions are automated, that the most advertisers have useful services for designers & developers and that almost all websites are updated every single day. What you get? The winning formula, described below in (not such a glossy) infographic piece.

Disclosure: Inspired Mag is one of the BSA publishers and I am very happy to help Todd with the Twitter stream. The numbers above are estimative, based on the public BSA listings, not the official numbers.

www.inspiredm.com

Mail Chimp

We Make Email Marketing Easy & Fun For Over 80,000 Users

Coda

Text editor + file transfer + svn + CSS + Terminal + Books + More = Whoah.  Welcome to Coda. Grow beautiful code

Skype

Free calls, video calls and instant messaging over the internet. Plus great value calls to phones anywhere in the world

37 Signals

A Better Way To Work.  Over 3 million people use our web-based apps to get things done the simple way

Wistia

Wistia is a platform for video marketing, sales, and collaboration.  Share and track video with prospects, customers, and employees

Sugar Sync

Get all of your files on-the-go, instantly and securely from any Mac, PC, or mobile device.  No extra effort. No extra baggage

The Invoice Machine

It’s beautiful and simple-to-use interface makes producing professional looking invoices a very pleasant experience

Mint

Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity

Get Satisfaction

Get Satisfaction brings customers and company employees together to make things better for everyone

Buy Sell Ads

Serving 1 billion + impressions across 1,000 websites per month

www.inspiredm.com