So like many people who run a whole bunch of website I use Google Analytics to track visits to those websites. GA — for those unfamiliar with the product — is a free Google service that works via an embedded bug on each webpage on the site. When activated it reports useful anonymised information back to Google including IP address, browser and OS version, page referrer etc. When this information is combined with other stuff Google already knows about, including the location on Earth of most IP addresses (i.e. the one your computer is using right now) and the analytics from other sites also embedding the GA bug they’re able to produce some extremely interesting graphs that can help you work out what content is popular on your site, how people are finding it and what impact changes you make over time have on attracting a larger audience.
Anyways…
This morning I saw a link to http://www.google.com/analytics/apps/results — I’m not sure where now, maybe it was in my RSS aggregator. That link has links to a bunch of other useful apps some for iPhone/iPad, and some web apps like the following:
http://analyticsvisualizations.appspot.com/
Juice Analytics talks directly to the GA API and can produces the most wonderful looking visualisations. All of the image on this page were produced using the analytics reporting from this web site. These next two being the results of my most popular piece of content:
Keyword Tree based on "airport" coloured by "average time on site"
Keyword Tree based on "airport" coloured by "% new visitors"
Talk about awesome user interface design 
The following visualisations were created for use as eye candy in a podcast I’m editing for the 53rd Sydney Film Festival. Specifically I intend to use them for the Hyperdistribution Pod/Webcast Masterclass featuring Mark Pesce.
All of the imagery you are about to see was generated by the Azureus Java BitTorrent client during an actual download. They were captured using a trial version of the awesome screen capture utility from Ambrosia Software, SnapzPro. Each of captured videos were then manipulated in Final Cut Pro, before being encoded using ffmpegX
The animations are all copyright (c) James Christopher Murty 2006 under the Creative Commons license Attribution-NonCommercial 2.1 Australia.
“Come and Join the Swarm” – graphically illustrates a torrent being started up. A client becomes one with the swarm as Azureus is able to locate more and more peers who have parts of the desired file. This animation has had an exponential acceleration applied to it compressing about 15 minutes of activity down to 15 seconds.
(15 seconds, 2.4MB)
“A Million Tiny Pieces” – graphically illustrates a file broken into lots of smaller pieces. The animation shows the current upload and download status of each of these pieces. This animation has been sped up compressing about a minute and a half of activity down to five seconds.
(5 seconds, 550KB)
“I Have Peers in Many Places” – graphically illustrates other peers in the swarm currently uploading and downloading the file and their approximate geographic locations. This animation has been sped up compressing about a minute of activity down to five seconds.
(5 seconds, 800KB)
These animations are encoded at 768×576 at 25 frames per second using H264 (MPEG4 Part 10/AVC).
Apple QuickTime 7.1 or above is required to view these videos. I’ve had reports that QuickTime 7.0 and lower under Windows will crash Microsoft I.E. when attempting to play back similarly encoded clips.
