MCB is one of the alpha testers for Jackson Miller’s Statzen. Jackson writes a bit about this today:

You cannot run a business by measuring and analyzing the business. A retail business is successful by having a good product and great customer service. Still, analytics can help you make a business better.

This is why I am doing statzen. I want to know how my blog is doing so that I can make it better. Any statistics service can give hits and visits, but that is the equivalent of knowing sales and COGS; it just isn’t very helpful. I want statzen to answer more in-depth questions like “which topics are people most interested in?”, “What attention does an average post get? How does this post measure up?”, “Is my blog growing or declining?”

Really, statzen is about bringing “business intelligence” to the conversational web. Our experience as retail store owners is definitely influencing how we think about measuring performance on blogs.

Statzen has some really neat features and they’re only getting better. Yesterday he and I were talking and he mentioned that he could do a report on traffic by author on a multi-author blog. This is really a breakthrough. It takes old, 2 dimensional stats and makes them 3D. Once Statzen is finished, it will really help bloggers to be able to direct their blogs to be able to maximize traffic. And that, kids, is neat-o.