"FnordMetric is a highly configurable (and pretty fast) realtime app/event tracking thing based on ruby eventmachine and redis. You define your own plotting and counting functions as ruby blocks!" Interesting.

"Statisticians’ sex appeal has little to do with their lascivious leanings ... and more with the scarcity of their skills. I believe that the folks to whom Hal Varian is referring are not statisticians in the narrow sense, but rather people who possess skills in three key, yet independent areas: statistics, data munging, and data visualization. (In parentheses next to each, I’ve put the salient character trait needed to acquire it)."

This might come in handy sometime.

A nice approach to doing some of the typical monitoring you'd want to do with Google Analytics, eg monitoring PDF downloads. I'm not totally convinced by some of his syntax, but the functionality is good, and the regex trick is nice.

"What are the weird, seemingly unimportant data that can join up the areas we already know, and how do we know where to look for it? In order to be truly useful eyes on the street, we need to be able to take the scenic route, or shortcuts, or any other route that will be fun or illuminating for us and the people we speak to."

"Fuelly is a site that lets you track, share, and compare your gas mileage. Simply sign up, add a car, and begin tracking your mileage." Looks interesting.

"Users need to see results before they can ask better, more detailed questions. These feedback loops provide critical learning. Users need to get to data as quickly and easily as possible. A screen without data is delayed progress."

Crazy Egg is, basically, low-budget heatmapping for the web. Powered by Rails - it'd be interesting to look into this more when certain things go live...