Popular websites around the world

Zia Daniell Wigder | May 16, 2007, 10:44 AM

I had coffee yesterday with the director of one of the Middle Eastern films that aired at the Tribeca Film Festival this year. Her film was on Libya, a country I’m very interested in for the video dialogue program. In doing a bit of digging on the state of technology and the Internet in Libya, I came across miniRank, a site that bills itself as ranking “the most popular websites in the world”. It ranks just those sites with the country's domain (Alexa includes non country-specific sites on its list) and the methodology is clearly more art than science:

The popularity score of any given website is calculated from a wide range of qualitative factors such as: website's content, related websites, linking structures, overall quality, obeying standards, and much more.

However, if you look at it simply to get an idea what some of the popular local sites are in countries off comScore's or Nielsen’s radar, it’s kind of cool.