Web analytics company SiteMeter has rolled out a major update to its free and premium web stats tracking service. The new version of SiteMeter is full of new charts and graphs that let you see how a web site is performing at a glance. The update is also supposed to do a better job of accurately tracking unique visits and page views.

One of the biggest changes for web publishers is that you no longer need a separate login for each web page you maintain. You can bring all of your accounts together under a single username and password. You can also decide whether to offer visitors full, partial, or no access to your statistics.

Some reports appear to have been retired, like the traffic prediction report. But others have been added or expanded. For example, you can now see how your site stacks up against other web sites in a given category using SiteMeter. And while users used to be able to see visits and page views by day, week, month, or year, you can now select a custom time period to view.

Overall, the new SiteMeter looks a lot prettier and offers you many new ways to analyze web site traffic. Will that be enough to convince people to choose SiteMeter over other free services like Google Analytics? It doesn't really matter. There's nothing preventing you from using both services simultaneously. Many web publishers do.

Update: In response to the overwhelmingly negative reception this redesign has received, Sitemeter is rolling back its service to the old version. No word on how much time and money they've spent on the "upgrade." While the new service certainly offers more features than the old version, reports take longer to load, they're not as simple to read as the old versions, and most importantly, a large number of Sitemeter users had complaints.

Results from a new survey by Marshal are in, and apparently 29% percent of the respondents to a recent survey admitted they made purchases from spam messages. That number is up from a 2004 survey in which only 20% admitted doing so. I was all set to vent about people getting sucked in when I realized something: who cares?

Marshal's VP of Products, Bradley Anstis, said "Many of us often question ourselves, why is there so much spam? The answer is, enough people are purchasing products from spam to make it a worthwhile and profitable endeavour for spammers."

Well duh. Thanks for the press release!

There's no shortage of packages for tracking statistics on visitors to your blog or web site. But we have to say, Woopra looks like it could blow the competition out of the water. That's because it offers real-time stats tracking, showing you a list of who's on your site right now, where they came from, and what they're looking at. And if they've left comments or otherwise identified themselves to Woopra, you can check out their user profiles and even send them an invitation to chat in real-time while they're visiting your site.

The service is currently in beta, but the plan is to make it available free of cost to Linux, Mac, and Windows users. You can sign up for a free account today, but you might have to wait a little while for Woopra to approve your web site. The developers are still working on scaling the system to support a large number of accounts.

[via GeekBrief.TV and TechCrunch]

Most word processors will give you some basic statistics about documents you're working on, like a word count. But what if you want to see how many words, paragraphcs, sentences, characters, and spaces are in a text-based document without opening it up in a word processor?

Text Stat is a lightweight, open source Windows application that will let you analyze any TXT or HTML file. In addition to those stats, you Text Stat will spit out a whole bunch of numbers that you'll probably never need to know, including the average number of syllables per word, the average number of words per sentence, and a Flesch score, which basically tells you how difficult the article is to read.
[via gHacks]

I haven't met two small business owners in a meeting where one doesn't ask how to get his or her site to the top of the Google search results list. There are transparent reasons for wanting to be first: you get more clicks, your business seems important, clicks convert into business, and your Internet traffic can skyrocket. What's the magic formula for getting to the top?

There is no magic formula
Disappointing as it is, there is no single solution to move your site's rank to #1 in Google. Now that you're over that impractical wish, let's find out how you can increase your page rank and stay away from what will get your Web site tossed from consideration.

Optimize your Web site
Sometimes called SEO, Search Engine Optimization (or SEM, Search Engine Marketing are related but not the same), is a marketing tool more than it is a technology process (so put it in your advertising budget). People type queries (search terms) into search engines and Google delivers results. If your site is optimized for your key product or service, then why isn't it at the top of the results? Common problem: your site hasn't been optimized and search engines cannot find it. You want examples?

Have you ever wondered how many diseases there are in the world right at this moment? Wondered to the extent that you would like it broken down into noncommunicable diseases, and infectious diseases? How about how many injuries of the various most common types (traffic accidents, falls, drownings, poisonings, etc) or how many deaths have happened?

The World Clock at Poodwaddle is a little different than your average world clock. This one attempts to estimate a whole bunch of statistics calculated based on recent estimates. You can control the time frame you are looking at - either year to present, or maybe just this hour... it's up to you.

It seems like the kinds of things that have large bodies of statistics available to put together a project like this are all quite morbid. Or maybe it was a conscious decision on the part of the developer to make us think a bit more. In any event, it's kind of creepy.

Shaun Inman's Mint quickly rose to the top of our list of web stats tracking tools as it offers a powerful, customizable interface and a rich plug-in architecture that has quite a following. After launching Mint v2 back in January of this year, Inman has been releasing minor .x version updates to address the usual bugs and other quirks, but a new Mint v2.12 release brings some minor new features and one big new pepper (that's Mint-speak for 'plug-in'): the Outbound Pepper. As its name suggests, Inman's new pepper tracks outbound links from your site, helping you to see where exactly your visitors surf next.

Other changes in this new version include some updates to the display and handling of Mint's advanced preferences, as well as a new 'Ignore IPs' advanced preference to help you keep track of just the traffic you want. There is also a new 'Found' tab in the Searches pepper that lists pages at your site and the keywords used to find those pages.

As usual with Mint updates, this new version is available free to all registered users. You can find out a lot more about Mint from Haveamint.com, with a demo installation for your to tinker with before buying. Licenses for Mint cost a mere $30/domain.

[via Peppermint Tea]

Mint is a powerful, extensible web statistics package from Shaun Inman, web designer extraordinaire. With a wide array of plug-ins that can even incorporate stats from other services like FeedBurner, Mint is a one stop, self-installable shop for virtually any and all stats you will ever have to view for your site. In fact, one of Mint's strengths is that it can be customized to scale down gracefully to a one-column view for users who prefer the option to view their stats on mobile devices. Even after getting an internet-rich iPhone, however, Richard Herrara doesn't want to have to chose between the default two-column view or the device-optimized view - so what's a web hacker to do? Why, hack one of Mint's files to auto-detect the iPhone browser and only display the one-column view for that particular device, of course! Head over to Herrara's site for the instructions on two simple edits you must make to Mint's head.php file, as well as a custom iPhone stylesheet to upload for some dual-mode desktop/iPhone Mint-y goodness.

[via Peppermint Tea]

Shortly after we discovered web statistics site Xinu, the developer's servers seem to have overloaded, because users reported that the site was unavailable.

Well, it looks like Xinu's been resurrected. The developer has published the source code under a creative commons license and listed a series of mirrors where you can check out the service. The developer suggests that the code isn't particularly pretty, but anyone with the necessary know how is welcome to help work out the bugs.

In the meantime, Xinu's still a nifty little tool for checking a whole slew of web statistics in one place. Among other things, you can find your Google PageRank, your Technorati Authority, how often pages from your site have been submitted to social bookmarking pages, and how many readers have subscribed to your site using Bloglines.

Of course, all of this is freely available data, but Xinu saves you the time and trouble of tracking down each statistic one by one.

Google Analytics is out of beta, in what may be record time for a Google product. The final version builds on some of the goodies first introduced last month, and includes changes suggested by folks like Search Engine Watch's Danny Sullivan and Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal.

As of July 18th, you'll no longer be able to access the previous version of Google Analytics.

So what's new?

• Hourly reporting - take a look at your visits/page views by daily or hourly report
• Clickable URLS - click through to the pages referenced in your reports
• Increased number of data rows per page
• Bounce rate increase and decrease colors were reversed (red now = bad, while green = good)
• AdWords integration

As usual, there are a bunch of other minor tweaks and changes that you can read about in the release notes.

[via Marketing Pilgrim]

We're big fans of web stats packages, and Shaun Inman's powerful and flexible Mint is definitely near the top of our list. While Mint and its various plugins can watch all manner of web stats and there are even widgets to check some stats from the comforts of your desktop, Tyler Hall decided to go one step further and has built a pepper (i.e. - a plugin for Mint) simply titled php-Growl that can send some Mint statistics to Growl, the Mac OS X system notification utility. While it can take some configuring (the comments at the Peppermint Tea post where we found this offer a good overview), this sounds like a handy way to keep an eye on stats without having to furiously refresh your Mint page or run yet another Dashboard widget.

php-Growl is being hosted at Google Code and is distributed under the MIT License.

More hack attacks originate from inside the US than from anywhere else on earth and, increasingly they're coming from more organized and focused groups. Those are the findings of a report released yesterday by security firm Symantec.

The US was the source for 31 percent of attacks, with China following a distant second at 10 percent according to the report. To make matters worse, thanks to this vibrant underground run-amok, your credit card info can be purchased for as little as $1 US, and full sets of identification credentials (name, address, mother's maiden, etc) can be had for only $14 bucks. Yikes!

In unrelated news, my name will be Robert Paulsen from here on out. I got a sweet deal too!

As I get more serious about the writing I'm doing on a couple of personal sites, I've also become more interested in finding a good web statistics tool to learn everything I can about my visitors. This is why a 2.0 upgrade to Mint, a powerful and stylish web-based monitoring package we found back in 2005, couldn't have come at a better time. Created by Shaun Inman, web designer extraordinaire, Mint has everything you need to keep track of, well, everything you need to, along with a flourishing plugin community called the Peppermill for adding just about anything you want.

Now Mint 2.0 costs $30 per domain (upgrades from version 1 are $19), but after checking out the screencasts and live demo, you can color me sold. I've been bouncing between using monthly services like SiteMeter and even FeedBurner's new StandardStats for websites, and neither of them hold a candle to the style, extensibility, power and gorgeous design of Shaun's Mint. Besides, I'm always happier paying a lump sum over subscribing, so Mint is going to pay for itself in just a few months anyway.

If you're looking for one of the most impressive web stats packages that you can run on your own servers, Mint looks like a fantastic option.

[via Daring Fireball]

Are you interested in Google Video stats? Come on, they could be interesting sometimes right? Google Video now gives us a little more insight into videos. Next to the "All time views" text for a video, there is now an arrow that can be clicked on that will display:

• The number of views
• Its overall rank
• The number of views from yesterday
• Yesterday's rank
• How many of yesterday's views were from emailed videos and embedded videos
• Its rank in the top emailed and embedded videos
• A chart showing the number of views from the last week

Have fun checking the stats out. They could be pretty interesting for the videophiles out there.