Hank [BS/MSEE,
MSM $$$, Ph.D. Mgmt] teaches As an entrepreneur, knowing everything about your web site traffic is paramount to exploiting 
information for competitive advantage. In today’s blog, I’m going to walk you through a little information about www.thinkbeta.com/blog that is available to me. The data was cut about 3PM Tuesday, 4/29/08. While the blog is lengthy, it consists mostly of screen captures.
In the first graph titled “People Count,” www.compete.com provided information on total UNIQUE traffic to the site. Unique means the same person coming back is counted only once. You can see from the graph that traffic has been increasing nicely this year.
All of the following data is from www.Woopra.com, which I have qualified for - it’s not available to the general public as yet. I blogged about woopra two days ago. This is probably not going to be pretty, but here goes:
Overview provides just that, daily traffic. Since I only brought Woopra online Sunday, we start from there.
My Content indicates what visitors are reading.
Query/URL provides the Google query used that landed them on the blog. It is useful for setting SEO tags.
Referrer provides where then came from if by link.
Country is what country their IP maps to.
Browsers used is just that, what viewer’s browser brand is.
Platforms is the Operating System in use. And last, from another plugin Feedjit, a screen capture of country hits. The flags may be clicked on to ascertain what the person from that country viewed. Of course the challenge is to figure out how to best use this information. I have only provided a taste of what’s available. Hank 
This looks a lot like Google analytics. The user interface looks a little prettier but it has the same gist. The good thing about Google analytics is that it makes your Google search ranking higher. I’m not sure if you care about that one way or an other though. Overall, it looks like you have visitors from all over and that is pretty cool.
I just cant believe more people are using IExplorer than firefox.
Windows 98 for the WIN!! I smell an upgrade in someone’s future!
sadly IE is still the default install on all winblows computers, only mildly computer literate people will download firefox. Speaks to the competence of people…
The problem that I have with these analytic tools is why all this info is necessary for a blogger, or even any website… Knowing how many people, what they read and where they were linked from I know is important, but who cares what OS or web browser someone is using? I guess to what you need to maintain compatibility with. I really do not think bloggers (your an exception because you do not profit from your blog) should use analytics because it will influence what they publish, a blog should be what the blogger wants, not his reader base. That might seem odd to some, but blogs are just digested news sources, all of them offer some sort of opinion. I don’t want the opinion of the masses when I read a blog, I want the opinion of the person reading the blog. Opinions of the masses can be had anywhere. If the person (blogger) is an idiot, then no one should read his blog. If the blogger offers something no one else does, his blog should be read. In most cases I find that when people try to cater to the masses, or follow the norm, they end up taking a great product/service and ruin it.
Am I saying that these tools are the downfall of the internet? NO. There are probably some instances when knowing what country your users are from is relevant beyond changing your content to suit them, such as adding localizations.
However, I realize that no one would make these products if there really was no use for them, so Hank, what does a blogger/website use these tools for, other than changing their content to attempt to suit their readers?
Do you have to pay for the data or service of tracking the traffic? [Hank says - It's free but currently in closed beta.]
Boo IE nice to see Firefox 3 on there, why doesn’t it say beta though and why is ubuntu not counted as linux? [Hank says - Agree both counts - FF3 is in beta 5, and ubuntu is certainly a Linux branch.]
I like the detail that this service provides. I actually checked thinkbeta on Alexa, which is another big traffic monitor, and maybe its just because I dont have an account or anything there but there is hardly any useful information that they give you. All I can see from there is that thinkbeta has a traffic ranking of 674,663. Not too shabby