Take My Word For It

On a worldwide scale, sales of the Nintendo Wii have surpassed 50 million units, far more than either of it’s competitors, and almost more than both the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 combined.

The Wii has about 49% market share at this time, and is doing well in all territories with the “maybe” exception of Japan, in which it has slowed down a lot from previous years. While the Wii does have over two-thirds of the market share in Japan, it has been doing significantly worse this year, as the Japanese are in a gaming recession. The Wii sells around 20,000 units each week in Japan, while the PS3 maintains 10,000 and around 3,500 for the Xbox 360.

In the handheld market, the Nintendo DS has sold over 100 million units at this time, making it the best-selling handheld system ever. It is very likely for it to reach 150 million before the end of it’s lifetime, exceeding the Playstation 2’s 140 million record.

NFreak News Sales, Stats, Wii

Here is another post regarding the mighty Google. I did a lot of research the other night, and I finally understand the concept of Google PageRank (PR). It is way too complicated for me to attempt to explain in great detail, however, I will give a brief explanation.

Every page on the Internet starts out with a single point of PageRank. When a page links to other pages, it gives a portion of it’s PageRank to that page, but most pages on the Internet link to dozens of other pages at once, so that “share” of the PageRank is distributed evenly between all of the pages being linked to.

As you can probably tell, getting links from other websites is very important when it comes to increasing PageRank. Otherwise, a website is just trading all its PR back and forth to the other pages within the site, and nothing is gained. Right now we have a PageRank of zero (PR0). Some say that to get PR1, a page needs six points of PageRank, and the amount needed to get to PR2 is logarithmic, meaning that the difference between PR4 and PR5 is much less than the difference between PR5 and PR6.

I hope that this article has made sense, and I promise to lay low on these types of posts for a little while, as I suspect that many readers may not find this all that entertaining. Please realize, however, that these are some main concerns when it comes to running a website, and they can’t be left unaddressed. Anyways, I hope you all continue to read and comment on the blog. Good things are to come; take my word for it.

UPDATE: NFreak-Bot
I created this bot to crawl one page of NFreak.net every minute. I suspect it might take days/weeks before it is finished, but it might be interesting for you to check out. The above page will display the most recent page that the bot has crawled. After it is finished, I’m going to make something to calculate PageRank. If anyone is interested in running the bot on their own website, comment here and I can hook you up.

NFreak Site Statistics PageRank, Stats

Unfortunately, we were too busy last semester to get much work done on the web site, but in the past month or two we have really stepped it up. I would estimate that we have spent an average of two hours per day working on the site lately, but sometimes it is much more. A significant amount of time has also been spent on increasing the popularity of the site. We would very much like to expand, and there are a couple of ways in which we are doing so.

1. Google PageRank:
This is the big one. Everyone knows about Google, and if our site was to show up on the top of the search list more often, more people could find it. No one knows for sure of the exact algorithm that Google uses to determine PageRank, but it is represented as a number zero through ten. As of this post, we have a PageRank of 0 (the worst it could be), which only leaves room for improvement.

The main factor contributing to PageRank is the amount of websites that link in. If a website with a PageRank of ten was to link here, it would have a much greater affect than a website linking here with a PageRank of two. Forming partnerships between websites is a great way to increase PageRank. If anyone is interested in forming a partnership, please leave a comment or shoot me an email at admin [at] nfreak [dot] net.

2. Alexa Ranking:
Alexa is a group that ranks websites based on unique users and page views to the site. As of this post, NFreak.net is in 2,227,983rd place, which is extremely horrible. Our goal is to be in the top 500,000 websites by June. Alexa only receives data from Internet users that have their toolbar installed. If you have Firefox, you can download Alexa’s Sparky Toolbar; for IE users, you can go here and follow their instructions to download it. The toolbar is completely safe and it does not take up any extra space on your browsing window. It would be a huge favor to us if you installed it, and we would be forever grateful.

Current Alexa Ranking

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We are really hoping to increase the site ranking in the near future. Thank you very much for your future support!

NFreak Site Statistics Stats