Sorry for the silence lately- been busy coding up a storm (well, by my standards at least!).

A few weeks ago I was given the opportunity to beta-test MeasureMap, a new blog stats tracking tool created by AdaptivePath, the folks who invented the buzzword AJAX.

Anyway, I really like it, but with caveats. As you’d imagine, it’s AJAX-intensive. Yet this makes it feel like a nice add-on, but not substitute, for a the simpler, spreadsheet-like stats of say, StatCounter.

One example of what I mean is: visitors sorted by country. On statcounter you get a spreadsheet, with lots of clickable data. But on MeasureMap, you get a picture of the world, with different countries in different shades of red to give a visual representation. The same data, but I wouldn’t want one over the other…they seem more complentary to me. And the same is true for the other features.

Maybe that’s ok, although I’m not sure if it’s the positioning the AdaptivePath folks are seeking.

In the past week, my blog has been visited by people in 40 countries. This is about consistent from week to week lately. But it took actually seeing those countries shaded in on MeasureMap’s world map to truly appreciate how amazing that figure actually is: one lone blogger in Barcelona, able to connect with people in Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Chile, Iran, Macedonia, and other countries outside the usual suspects (USA & West. Europe).

There may be limited analytical value in working from a flash/ajax-ed map, but there’s value in its ability to stimulate reflection and perspective.