© chrisdlugosz

You're looking at a new social network. You've been invited to join it, but you're not very familiar with it. Is it safe? How do you find out?

With the influence of the Web growing, transparency has become a major concern on the Internet. The ability to find out just exactly who is behind a particular website has become important. And being able to find important facts about a web domain (like revenue, traffic patterns, and speed, and contact info) can be important to you, either for business reason or just to assess the credibility of the website. Where do you go to get information like that?

I recently came across the philoneist, a wiki that investigates and tells you what and who is behind a domain name. And with out much effort I found valuable information on a couple of websites I use pretty much every day.

An entry at the philoneist will often give you a screen capture image of the site being examined. That way you know that the entry is really about the site you're interested in.



There's a lot of basic information at the site. It tells you what language the site is written in. It gives you traffic data, contact information, server location, information about the website's speed, keywords associated with the site, and even a list of subdomains.

The entry on the DailyKos caught my eye because I subscribe to that news source in my reader. I learned that Kos Media, LLC started the site all the way back in 2002. I found out that TIME thinks the DailyKos is overrated. I found out that the site gets somewhere between 600K and 1.8 million unique visitors each month (a pretty hefty hunk of traffic). I found out that their server is in NYC and that they're making just at $525 a day ($190K per year) in ad revenue.

Compare that to Lifehacker (which I also subscribe to). It's been around since January 2005. It's owned by Gawker Media. Its server is in Brooklyn. TIME thinks it's one of the coolest sites on the Net. It gets between 330K and 750K unique visitors a day and brings in about $1850 a day ($675,000 per year) in ad revenue.

That puts the two sites in some perspective for me. It may even change the way I think about them.

So, What domains do you want to know more about? The information may very well be on the philoneist.