Webmetricsguru

Just found out about http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm   the live stats that are being produced by the BBC site, which covers a worldwide audience, is being fed to us live, in an attractive way.

It's Sunday, after all, so traffic is going to be light, more or less.  The news stories also change in ranking based on region you select and are updated dynamically.  the Most popular by day, so far, wins the prize, in my mind, for usability - this extremely easy tool to use puts a lot of web analytics data that's merged with the content in an easy way to consume.

What we use it for, I don't exactly know - but I find it interesting to see how stories change and perhaps, how traffic varies during the day/week -and that probably gets me to the site more often and therefore, the tool accomplishes it's purpose - which is to get me to spend more time engaged with the site.

I'd almost like to see this as an actual widget people can put on their sites - but maybe with a much smaller footprint - if such a thing was possible.