During my morning browsing today I came across Statbrain - a web service that "uses different resources on the web combined with mathematical and statistical methods to estimate how many visits a website has."

I hate to break it to you, fellas, but you need to re-work your math ever-so-slightly.

According to Statbrain, things don't look good for us: Download Squad's estimation was less than ten visits per day. That's a pretty poor showing for a site in the top 6,000 according to Alexa. Better still, the list of similar sites returned a slew of gibberish domains including a pair of NSFW Blogspot blogs.

Yet somehow Statbrain was apparently worthy of a mention in the list of "Cool Websites" from a fairly well-known blog whose RSS feed I read regularly. I may miss the mark from time to time with my recommendations, but please call the Spanish Inquisition on me if I ever sing the praises of a failure like Statbrain.

If you're looking for a tool like this, check out Quarkbase instead - it actually provides some useful information and stats.

Web analytics is an increasingly important metric for web publishers. It used to just be about tracking how many visitors you get and how many pages they view. Technology has improved so that you can now track site entry points, popular keywords, specific post metrics, out-bound clicks, nationality of your visitors and more. The problem is, to actually get that data into something useful, you usually have to dedicate a bunch of time analyzing statistics or you have to pay for an expensive commericial analytics package. Today, NuConomy is officially launching its free web analytics platform, NuConomy Studio, designed to meet both of those challenges.

The platform that NuConomy will most likely be compared to is Google Analytics, because both are free and both offer easy integration into various web platforms. In its scope, however, NuConomy Studio is much more akin to Omniture, but without the hefty licensing fee that pretty much excludes all but the biggest sites from taking advantage of its enhanced metrics.

For instance, most analytics programs can't monitor interaction with JavaScript (AJAX) or Flash elements. So you can't get a metric on how frequently that YouTube video is played (or which video is most popular). NuConomy can track AJAX, Flash and Silverlight and then show you what elements (or videos) were most popular. With YouTube videos, you can even find out how visitors are watching the videos before stopping or going to another page. So if you're a VBlogger, you can better pinpoint what is working and what isn't.

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]

Hot on the heals of Google snapping up Feedburner, features that were once free paid only are starting to be opened up to all users. For instance, Google opened up Feedburner stats, a once $5/ month subscription.

Google's second free slot in FeedBurner went to the MyBrand premium service. This once $3-$14/month service that runs all feeds through publishers own domains is now open to all users. The MyBrand service allows for content publishers to obtain a transparent branded experience when their content is accessed online. All of FeedBurners services can still be utilized, but everything will run through the publishers domain (feeds.domainnamehere.com). Publishers will be able to do this by changing the CNAME in their DNS records.

The FeedBurner MyBrand service is free and accessible through FeedBurner accounts. Activation instructions can also be found upon login as well.

[via GoogleSystem]

Do we care why Google bought DoubleClick? Well, it could be nice to know a little background history on the deal in progress.

Alex Kinnier, Google's Group Product Manager made a blog post yesterday as to why they decided to buy Doubleclick. Basically, DoubleClick has been a leader in the online advertising game from the beginning, helping advertisers get onto large sites such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, CNET and ESPN.com.

Google's display advertising was seen as a little speck compared to the giants of online display advertising, AOL, Yahoo and MSN, and they wanted to change that. Google feels that DoubleClicks products and technology complement their own quite nicely, that paired with DoubleClicks delivery mechanisms can help current AdWords customers obtain more precise metrics enabling them to get a better idea how their advertising campaigns are fairing out. DoubleClicks superior knowledge in the industry will also be able to help Google's initiatives out by communicating with agencies and publishers to create more innovative ad serving technologies. Through the DoubleClick deal Google will also be able to help out with unsold media using DART, a hosted enterprise-class advertising management and serving solution for publishers.

So there you have it. It's all about helping the advertisers out. And maybe a little about lining Google's pockets with some extra R&D and Engineering dollars, judging from all of the new releases lately.

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.

Is there still really a browser war? Microsoft hasn't updated its browser in how many years? So obviously they might not seem to care about internet users. Nonetheless, new statistics are showing that Firefox and Safari are gaining more ground as the browser of choice for web users. Internet Explorer has been losing ground steadily since Firefox was initially released. This new batch of browser market share stats put together by Market Share by Net Applications, shows that IE is at its lowest point since 2005, sitting at 82%. While Firefox is gaining ground from 7.5% in September 2005, to 12.4% in September 2006. The new IE 7 is supposedly due out this month (beta release is out now) with a complete redesign and overhaul, but will consumers bite? Are internet users sick of the lack of updates and compliance issues with IE? Will Google continue to lead and grow the evolution and mass adoption of Firefox? We shall only see in next Septembers browser stats.

We want to hear what you have to say about this. What browser do you use? And what makes it better than all the rest?

SiliconBeat is reporting that, according to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube has been surpassed in traffic by MySpace Videos, whose traffic doubled in July. This seems to be in contradiction with Alexa, which has YouTube continuing to climb above MySpace. According to comScore, YouTube had 16 million visitors in July--a 20% increase over July--compared to MySpace Videos' 20 million. Required reading to understand these conflicting numbers is SiliconBeat's Web Stats Are Broken. comScore puts MySpace second only to Yahoo! Video, which it says had 21.1 million visitors in July, exceeding YouTube's growth with a 28% increase over June.

There's been some contention over del.icio.us' traffic numbers lately, with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington pointing out that, according to Alexa, the social bookmarking site's traffic peaked in April and "by some measures they've tanked completely" since then. I'm a huge fan of del.icio.us, so some recent numbers from Hitwise are the kind that I like better. Hitwise says that del.icio.us is going strong, and since January its traffic has more than doubled. TechCrunch's Marshall Kirkpatrick underscores the real issue here: "Traffic numbers are maddeningly difficult to nail down, it's an issue that's rarely discussed but is a real problem." It just goes to show, you shouldn't rely on stats from just one source, and you should be prepared to flip a coin.

Performancing, the people who brought you the Performancing blogging extension for Firefox, have launched a new web service called Performancing Metrics that aims to provide "professional grade blog statistics" for serious bloggers. Performancing Metrics can handle multiple blogs and will aggregate data from all of your blogs, generates RSS feeds so you keep an eye on your stats easily, and shows AdSense data and search engine traffic. It's entering a market currently occupied by Mint and, though it's not geared specifically to blogs, Google Analytics. Performancing Metrics is currently in a free, open beta period; no word on whether the service will still be free once it's out of beta.

[Via Jeremy Zawodny]

Last week I mentioned about MyGuestmap, a keen Google Maps hack which lets your visitors show you where in the world they are. gVisit is a little different: Like a lot of web stats packages, it automatically guesses where each of your visitors lives, and then it automatically charts those visitors on a Google Map. It's not as personal as MyGuestmap—users might not even know they're being charted, and there are no cute icons or personalized messages—but it's more practical for the webmaster who wants serious reporting rather than a fun interactive feature.

P.S. How long before somebody prints t-shirts, pins, or bumper stickers featuring those cute Google Maps inverse-teardrop markers? I'd buy one.