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For almost three years now, we at Irregular Times have been tracking the share of sales of buttons, bumper stickers and t-shirts that promote the Democratic contenders for the presidency. We’d track Green and Republican Party candidates in this regard, but nobody’s bought anything of ours that favors a Green Party candidate for president, and there’s no way we’re going to sell anything promoting one of the Republican presidential candidates, so there you are. But there are other ways of tracking the progress of the various candidates of the political parties out there, and now that Labor Day 2007 is past us and the 2008 presidential season is upon us, track we shall.

Let’s start off by considering Alexa rankings. Alexa is the website that decided way back to offer an internet archive. That’s proven a bit tricky for the company to maintain, but they continue to collect information on site visits for websites across the ‘net. Alexa uses a combination of visitors and page views to a website (from users of the Alexa toolbar) to calculate a page rank. The most visited site in the whole internet would have a rank of 1, and the least visited website — well, that would get a big fat blank. Bottom line: the lower the page rank, the more visits and visitors a web page has been getting lately.

The following are the Alexa page ranks of Democratic, Green, Independent and Republican presidential candidates as of September 14, 2007:

Democratic Party
Joseph Biden : 222,965
Hillary Clinton : 44,328
Christopher Dodd : 293,475
John Edwards : 66,688
Mike Gravel : 169,985
Dennis Kucinich : 240,300
Barack Obama : 22,551
Bill Richardson : 237,610

Green Party
Jared Ball : 7,254,770
Jerry Kann : no visits by alexa users
Kent Mesplay : no visits by alexa users
Joe Schriner : 6,258,456
kat swift : 6,353,556

Independents
Orion Karl Daley : 6,621,929
Kelcey Wilson : no visits by alexa users

Republican Party
Sam Brownback : 328,365
Rudolph Giuliani : 124,228
Mike Huckabee : 219,294
Duncan Hunter : 397,286
John McCain : 144,333
Ron Paul : 20,222
Mitt Romney : 74,959
Tom Tancredo : 410,933
Fred Thompson : 139,887

The belles of the ball right now in terms of website visits seem to be Ron Paul and Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton is not too far behind the pair, with John Edwards and Mitt Romney rounding out the popularity pack. Overall, the Democratic candidates tend to be getting more webpage views than the Republicans, who are receiving many more visits than the Greens and Independents in the pack.

We’ll take a look at these again after a week’s time and see who’s trending up and down.