I recently posted a laundry list of potential blog analytics tools and decided to implement a few solutions on our blog to see how they were in action. While this process is still going on I ran into an interesting thread on Robert Scoble's blog. The discussion is similar but it's looking at Alexa, compete.com and several other general stats providers and asking why they're so horrible. After reading through a lot of comments I realized that there are three issues here that are being lumped together, and in so doing, it's creating more confusion.

1. General Stats - The Alexas of the web will always be off based on their methodologies using panel or toolbar data. the only way to shore it up is to create a better system that can prevent cheating...but this isn't going to happen soon.

2. Web Analytics - Obviously in this case there are a host of competitors ranging from free to really expensive and also varying wildly in their offering. This category is the definitive source to track everything going on at your local server...but it's not going to solve the bloggers dilemma. And it's hard to get two systems to say the same number...but at the end of the day it doesn't matter since you're looking for trending and directional information for the most part.

3. Blog Analytics - I recently did a post on my blog about the complete void within the blog analytics space...since that post I've heard that Google will be releasing Measure Map, a blog specific tool that seems quite powerful and takes a step beyond the current web analytics tools out there. The measure map UI was lifted for the new version of Google Analytics and is quite slick.

More to come next week on a comparison of pMetrics (terrible name) and StandardStats which have both been implemented on our blog.