I’ve been running the alpha of MeasureMap for a few weeks now, and I thought I’d do a quick brain dump.

First thing you notice? It’s pretty, just ridiculously, gratuitously whizbangy. And that can make it find of fun to play with, in and of itself. Still that Flash can be slow (though not apparently compared to Google Analytics), but really if I was getting the questions I had answered, I don’t think I’d notice.

And as a domain specific (blogs) stats package, they’ve done some nice work breaking up the reports into appropriate discrete units. (I love the daily overview screen you get when you click thru from the timeline and you’ve posted multiple blog posts in a single day)

The Wrong Questions

Maybe LaughingMeme is abnormal, but I have about 10 posts that Google loves so much that (according to MMap) they account for 47% of all my traffic. (and its a power law distribution) In general they aren’t posts I’m all that excited about: year old speculation on Google IMAP brings in hundreds of visitors a day, while Beklin Sucks! has been a perennial favorite, and daily traffic to I’m feeling lucky often exceeds 1000 visitors.

The fact that people are visiting these pages is boring. And the fact that Google is sending them there, day in and day out? Boring.

Show Me the Novel

What’s new? What’s different today then yesterday, this week then last week? Freak outliers, and emerging trends please.

55 Posts About Coffee And Still They Come

Help me out with audience. What brings the readers? What brings the links? What brings the comments? I’ve got my posts marked up with microformat tags, Yahoo has the term extraction API, lets use some of that domain specificity to do something new. (and while rel=”tag” is the only widely deployed microformats currently, more will follow)

Gurchin has got Gads integration, MMaps needs to distinguish by exploiting its specialty.

And Speaking of “conversions”

Any chance of hooking up with Feedburner to allow me to plot subscriber spikes to blog posts? No idea if the data would be compelling, but I know that most of the people in my subscription list got there by writing one really good post. (staying there is harder)

Sources and Fans

You’re tracking links in, and links out, I’d love to see that information compiled into its social mesh.

Quirky Stats Muching AI

Okay, what I really want is an AI that gets a kick out of pouring over the logs all day, and finding the quirky and sublime.

Imagine logging in to be told that “the query ‘bush in freefall’ was your 22nd most popular search yesterday, but your 1st most popular on searches coming from .mil” (true), or “the spike in ‘weather rss’ this weekend corresponded to freak hail storms across the country” (actually I have no idea why that query spiked). But I’m willing to settle for a bit less.