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just found a very cool Adobe AIR-based desktop-app for accessing Google Analytics…try it out!

Amazon’s traffic ranking-service Alexa finally gets rid of its most criticized flaw - strong bias towards Internet Explorer - by releasing their toolbar for the Firefox browser!

it will be interesting to see how strong this is going to affect rankings over the next few weeks, while ‘Sparky’ (the nickname of the Firefox-extension) supposedly experiences some adpotion. of course, if Alexa’s extrapolation-algorithms have been on par, we probably might not see any changes at all…

speaking of access statistics: seems like Google is starting to roll out a complete revamp of their Analytics product. like smime, the update hasn’t appeared for me yet, but the dynamic graphing-tools alongside extended reporting features shown in this screencast look promising…

Automattic, makers of notorious blogging-software Wordpress, have released their neat simplified statistics plugin for standalone installations last week (until now, the plugin has been available on their hosted service only). Automattic Stats breaks down access statistics to a few key-benchmarks, providing an easy first-sight overview. furthermore it’s supposedly stable even in high-traffic times (unlike some others stats-plugins out there…) and allows easy syndication of multiple blog-stats within one interface (just use the same API-key). given it’s a 3minute install, I recommend every Wordpress-user trying it out!

plain and simple: enter a URL and popuri.us spits out Google- & Alexa-ranking, numerous numbers of backlinks, RSS-subscription numbers and DNS-data. if you are looking for a more advanced tool, check out Competitious which tracks similar data but adds collaborative features.

RSS-publisher FeedBurner published an extensive report on RSS-readership and -usage, the latter meaning detailed stats on the number of indiviual item-clicks & -renderings (coined “audience engagement”). no big surprise - as mentioned before, Google Reader has taken the market of online feed-readers by storm…

as of yesterday, Google finally reports back RSS subscription-numbers to content-publishers, which basically means that feed-statistics like FeedBurner can now include the number of readers subscribed to a feed through Google Reader or the personalized Google homepage (this wasn’t possible before, meaning that probably thousands of readers wouldn’t show up in your feed-stats). in case you - like me - wonder how this works, Google simply embeds the number of current subscribers into the http-request fetching the feed:

User-Agent: Feedfetcher-Google;
(+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 3980 subscribers;
feed-id=1794595805790851116)

as a bonus they’ve also added an FAQ aimed at publishers.

btw, according to my own FeedBurner-stats, Google Reader’s marketshare among RSS-readers seems to rise:

sure, it’s common sense that Alexa’s traffic-stats have to be taken with a big grain of salt (the under-representation of traffic from non IE-browsers is only one major reason). but today Jason Calacanis goes a step further by claiming Alexa can be gamed (=manipulated) with no more than three clients running their toolbar & keeping an auto-refresh locked on the ‘optimized’ URL. during the next 10 days he’s conducting an experiment using his own site calacanis.com. if it’s really that easy (and well-known, as one commenter claims), I wonder why Alexa is still quoted at all…

for the record: calacanis.com is ranked at 13,773 as of today. in case you wonder: the recent peak starting nov 15th is caused by Jason’s resignation from AOL.

Competitious is a collaborative tool, helping project-teams to track competing websites in their market. just enter URL and name of a site and watch Competitious automatically collect traffic-data and related blog-posts both from the companies’ blog and from all over the web. users can create feature-lists to compare several services in a feature matrix. comparative traffic-data is graphed using Alexaholic (therefor limited to max. 5 sites per graph). users can track several independet projects and may share data with team-members. a bookmarklet is used to collect data from other sources - those so-called “clippings” are distributed among the team via RSS. keeping things simple & lean, Competitious might be a great timesaver for everybody in need to staying up-2-date in web(2.0)-space.

a recent post on FeedBurner’s official blog explains some of the service’ inner workings on the basis of TechCrunch’s RSS-feed, which has been breaking the 100.000 subscribers mark a while ago. the article explains characteristics as subscribers and reach and gives insight on the diversified usage of newsreaders (in the case of TechCrunch, there are more than 500 applications out there!). it still doesn’t detail how online-readers like Bloglines or Rojo, proxying feeds for thousands of indiviual users, are taken into account. furthermore, the post announces integration of feed-statistics with classic log-based stats, provided by recently aquired Blogbeat, by the end of 2006.