BlogBeat

Steve Rubel points to BlogBeat.com - a new hit tracking service aimed at bloggers. Something interesting right off the bat is the display of average hit values. I have no idea what the sample size is, but it shows a very different distribution to that described by Sifry. I'm guessing that BlogBeat is currently only getting attention from US bloggers whereas Technorati's data doesn't distinguish between bloggers from different countries and is possible being swamped by Chinese bloggers.

Here are yesterday's hourly average hits:

 
Note that I've made an assumption here that BlogBeat time is some US time. This may well not be the case as I notice that at 11, they have me tracked for 4am, which would put them somewhere like Hawaii.

Update: Jeff at BlogBeat tells me that the time is not Hawaii :-( - there seems to be an issue and they are working on it. On a related note, there seems to be some misconceptions around the service that BlogBeat provides. BusinessBlog seems to be saying that they are a blogosphere analytics tool. They are basically a site meter for blogs. That is to say, a stats counter that knows about blogs and which (at least according to the interface, though I have yet to see this working) probably delivers inlink information as well. However, though they are consumer facing, their privacy statement certainly suggests that they intend to get into the data mining business:

Blogbeat collects this usage information in order to provide you the traffic and analysis details of your blog. Unless required by law, we will not share this data, except in aggregate or anonymous form, with third parties. We may, however, use usage information to provide rankings or relevant search results relating to information already available on your blog. [my bolding]

Comments

[Jefff Turner]

Hi Matt,

Unfortunately, no, we are not in Hawaii. We're working through some kinks (including the dates in that chart) that we hope to have fixed soon.

As for our service, we are simply a blog analytics tool. Our service is for bloggers, to help them monitor their traffic and figure out how posts find their way to their readers.

As for the privacy policy, the last line is really what we are going for: we want to let you compare your blog to other Blogbeat blogs. Like our average page views chart.

This could also be something like publishing aggregate stats in a RSS feed, for example, that others could use to compare to other services. Thus, the "third parties".

And you'll be able to completely remove your stats from any of this... We're just trying to leave the door open to do cool new things, but not at the cost of our core service.

Jeff