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 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.

Thousands of web sites are currently inaccessible to Internet Explorer 5.5, 6, and 7 users thanks to a new Sitemeter bug. Sitemeter is a free web analytics service used by many popular blogs and web sites including Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and Consumerist. They all appear to be affected as of this morning. It's worth noting that the bug only affects Internet Explorer users. The web sites load just fine in Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

It's likely that the bug is due to tracking code changes Sitemeter has been rolling out. Visitors to web sites using the code who are using IE will see the page start to load, and then get an error message. When you click OK to make the error message go away, the entire site goes with it. Nice.

If your site has been affected it looks like you have two options. You can either remove the code altogether until Sitemeter gets its act together, or you can try modifying your code by using the plain HTML version instead of the Javascript version. If you take the latter route, your counter won't show up thanks to another bug, but at least it will continue tracking visits to your site.

Thanks Darren Paul!

Update: It looks like the bug has been fixed.

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]

Microsoft has opened the doors (well, cracked the window really) for its new Google Analytics competitor. Codenamed, Project Gatineau, the new web analytics tool will offer web publishers and advertisers advanced tools for measuring how people are interacting with web sites.

The private beta which launches today is only available to US-based advertisers at the moment. Advertisers can sign up via a Microsoft website. During the beta, Project Gatineau will only be available to adCenter account holders, which means you'll have to shell out $5 to sign up for an account if you don't already have one. It's not clear if the analytics tool will be available to users without adCenter accounts after Project Gatineau emerges from beta.

[via Bink.nu]

Seriously, is there any cool Google service that Microsoft isn't trying to duplicate? There's book search, health sites, map services, and now web analytics. (Of course, we can't blame them, seeing as Google's taking on Microsoft Office with a web-based clone).

Right now, Google Analytics is probably the most powerful free web-based analytic tool on the market. Sure, it has a few quirks that you probably wouldn't find in a commercial application. But it gives you a lot of control over how you analyze traffic on your web site.

It looks like Microsoft is preparing to launch a new web-based tool that will be at least as powerful. Microsoft's Ian Thomas introduced the new project, code-named Gatineau, at Web Analytics Day. A private beta is expected to launch next week. At first, Gatineau will be available only in English and only in countries supported by Microsoft's adCenter.

Microsoft is currently accepting applications for the beta.