Cynics Unlimited

Admit it – as a blogger, one of your favourite activities is pouring over your webstats. It’s fun to see who is visiting your site, how many times they visit, who sent them and where they reside. If you lack a good web stats tool or prefer a highly visual overview of your recent traffic, MapStats may be the answer. Combining traditional webstat summaries with Google Maps, BlogFlux MapStats allows you to see exactly where in the world your web traffic is coming from - unique visits are marked on a scalable world map with an orange marker and details about the visitor (time, browser, page visited, operating system, etc).

The free version of MapStats shows visitors for the current day along with graphs and statistical summaries for visitors over daily/weekly/monthly/yearly periods . The commercial version of the service allows the selection of custom date ranges. To use the free version, sign up at BlogFlux (which has a number of useful blog-related tools) and place the specified Javascript on your site.

While MapStats does not offer the detailed statistical dissections available in Mint or Slimstat, it does provide a very good overview of potential target markets and allows you to be just a little creepy in your research. As a free service, MapStats is highly recommended.