LooseSuits

There's also Compete (.com) which offers similar statistics to Alexa, from toolbar users like Alexa.

Frankly, I think they're all shit -- partly because, as you say, they can all be gamed but also because they're either massively scaled (see below) or they're for internal use.

By scaled I mean: Alexa and Compete use reports from a tiny number of users, and extrapolate from there to try and represent the total numbers of people on the web. In that strand, some niches have fewer (proportionally speaking) users with the toolbars and some have higher. For example a webdev/seo niche is more likely to have them while the niche for my-little-pony is probably going to have very few.

And because they're so scaled, it only takes a couple more people with the toolbar to massively increase your rankings.

PageRank isn't a viable statistic because it factors in too many things. It's used to help Google generate search results, not show what sites are generally better than others, even how much traffic or subscribers one site has over another.

The only way you could have rock-solid results is by collecting all the log data from every webserver in the world, or install spyware in every user agent. I don't see that happening.

I agree with pretty much all of what you say, but when you want to compare external websites that you have no control over I can't think of any other way.

I shall take a look at compete - thanks for pointing it out :)

Just signed up with compete and am having a play with their api. It's given me the site ranks for them which is great. I figure the more of these services I can use the better so if anyone knows of any others I'd appreciate a comment :)

Thanks

Blogpulse from Nielsen BuzzMetrics is interesting.
Mark

Good link Mark, I haven't seen that one before.

Are You an A-List Bloglebrity?

Oh, our blogelebrity is C-list. At least it's not D-list I guess. :(

That's a pretty cool tool!