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Jeff from adaptive path let me in on the private alpha release of MeasureMap today, and I’ve been playing with it for an hour or two now. Not long enough to see how it compares to my existing stats package in terms of collecting raw numbers, but definitely long enough for me to have some initial thoughts on it.

And I’ll tell you something - it’s looking pretty good so far.

But first, what is MeasureMap?

Well, even if you’ve been living in a cupboard with no electricity, food or water for the last six months, the chances are you’ll still have heard of MeasureMap at some point. Put simply, it’s a stats package designed with blogs in mind, with the official line written by Jeff being…

Here is our quick pitch: Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs.

It’s already had plenty of exposure, rightly because it’s the first web application offered by expert usability geezers adaptive path, wrongly because it initially appeared to be going head to head with Mint, and more recently, simply because of what it is and what it does.

It’s one of those applications that takes something we’ve all used at one point, and then redefines the way we should actually be using it. I’m talking about website stats - or more specifically, the stats you collect about your blog. Because where MeasureMap really makes a point of being different is that it doesn’t mention page loads, or entry pages, or exit pages, or keyword analyses, or visitor paths, or drilling down through data, or any of that usual stuff that makes website statistics difficult to understand for the average user.

But it’s not just that traditional stats packages are difficult to understand. The data they churn out is fairly difficult to use, too. Bloggers need that data to help them promote their blog, and to find out which parts of their blog are most successful in bringing in traffic. If it’s not readily available in a format they can identify with, it’s just not going to get used. Simple as that.

Keeping things simple.

So, right off the bat, MeasureMap looks like it’s been designed to be incredibly easy to use. It’s built on Flash and AJAX, so it looks and feels differently to a traditional stats package, too. And instead of ten or twelve separate complex-sounding stats queries to choose from with even more complex looking charts and tables, you simply get four large icons: Visitors, Links, Comments and Posts. So far, so good. And very, very blog-oriented. The overview page shows a list of your most popular posts at a glance - listed by title - whereas with a standard stats package, you’d be looking at a tabular mess of URLS, which isn’t the easiest way to see which of your posts are being read the most.

Clicking on the Visitors icon pulls up a top-level view of today’s traffic for your blog. You can see immediately how many unique visitors your blog has had today, and what percentage of these have been to your blog before. You get the last 30 days’ worth of data in a chart at the bottom of that page. Hang around in the Visitors tab and you can also select browser share, country share and a chart that shows you what times of the day brought you most visitors.

Standard stuff? Kinda. But the real difference is the way in which it’s presented. For example, the country share map presents the data in the form of a rich, flash based interactive map. You hover your mouse over the countries in red, and a tooltip tells you how many visitors you had from that country. And if you write a great post, you can literally watch it spreading across the world. Simple, effective, and a lot tastier, visually speaking, than a pie chart.

Posts, not pages.

It’s the Posts tab that interests me most. Instead of looking at sitewide statistics for page views, inbound links and outbound links, MeasureMap does it on a per post basis. That’s ‘per post’, not per URL. It means that you instantly know which of your blog entries you’re viewing data for, and you don’t need to spend time translating URLs into post titles. So, on each individual post page, you get an overview telling you how many visitors your post has had today, how many people have linked into and away from that post, and how many comments you’ve had on it. A nice little surprise happens when you click the date button at the top of that page: you see a visual representation of when that post was published, together with a chart showing the number of visitors that individual post has had since being published. That’s a fantastic tool for checking the ‘life’ of each post, and it could be a great help in deciding what factors give a post true longevity.

Link analysis.

In terms of tracking links, MeasureMap again does a great job of simplifying things. In fact, it breaks it all down into just three metrics - links in, links out, and search terms. Again, the three essential pieces of information you need when gauging the popularity of your blog, right there at your fingertips.

Keeping an eye on your comments.

Click the Comments tab and you get two pieces of info: how many comments were left in total on your blog today, and how many individual blog posts picked up comments. I’m sure that more functionality will be built into this given time, but right now, it’s a neat way to check how much buzz your blog is generating on a day-by-day basis.

I only wish I had more data.

MeasureMap has been designed from the start to identify the most important data you need to be able to gauge just what makes your blog tick. It’s apparent even with just a few hours’ worth of traffic that it offers new ways of looking at that data, and that the ways in which that data is presented are much more relevant to a blog than any traditional statistics package could ever be. I’m looking forward to being able to test it with a few weeks - or better still, months - worth of numbers.

In terms of limitiations, I’m going to hold off on that for now as MeasureMap is still in alpha release, and still a little rough around the edges. However, I’m sure that when it’s publically available (by the end of the year?), there’ll be a lot more functionality and many more features than I’m seeing right now.

But maybe it’s not entirely fair to compare MeasureMap to a traditional stats package. Howver, as someone who runs a network of blogs, I’d want to give my bloggers access to something like MeasureMap instead of the clunky stats package I’m currently using. I think it would definitely help everyone learn a lot more about their blog, a lot more about their individual posts, and a lot more about how, when and where to promote their writing, too.

And that can only be a good thing.