Michaewa

A good name for an exceptional swimmer in their first year of college:

AquaFrosh

I love package tracking via UPS…for some reason it heightens anticipation of packages to see exactly where they went and when they went there.

Now…I did some looking for this but didn’t see anything initially. I would love to see a graphical display…e.g. overlay the progress on top of a Google Map or similar.

Please begin immediately and keep me posted on your progress.

I’ve been talking to a few friends lately about the changing landscape of the internet, and becoming more interested in trends developing there. I seem to have idea after idea, most of which to this point have been either pretty half-baked or implemented long ago by someone with a bit more foresight.

The most recent one to pop up was a way to measure the popularity of a blog in a scientific fashion. I’ve seen a few tools out there, but nothing that really got to the heart of it. My thought is that ideally you could go to a simple list, updated in real time that would show stats for blogs such as :

• Unique daily visitors
• Total pageviews
• RSS subscribers
• Posts per day
• Comment cadence

This would provide a google-news like view of the current blog landscape. You could view the outright most popular blog at any given time, or if you were a contrarian you could jump to the bottom of the list.

Getting this information seems a little bit tricky at best, but if you could make it easy for bloggers to opt-in, I think you’d see decent adoption. I’m sure someone is getting ready to release a beta version of this already, but here is my thought. You go after the big pieces of the pie first. Provide an automated way for users of Blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type, and other major players a built-in snippet of code that would unobtrusively report aggreate statistics about traffic patterns. For other custom bloggers or those with older versions, provide a plugin that could be dropped in. Build master database in the sky, and just come up with a few ways to slice and dice the data for public use.