David McCreath

[The Society for HandHeld Hushing](http://www.coudal.com/shhh.php), presented by [Coudal Partners](http://coudal.com/) and [Aaron Draplin](http://www.draplindustries.com/). My wife is going to be so happy.

In the olden days, we were happy with hit counters. We could tell how many people had loaded a given page by looking at the cool graphic numbers down at the bottom. Then as we learned more about how to use our hosting accounts, we became familiar with [analog](http://analog.cx) and learned to decipher its many pie charts, and eventually other [contenders](http://awstats.sourceforge.net) came along. Of course there were always the [commercial products](http://webtrends.com) that were used by the e-commerce sites, but I’m talking about the personal publisher of 2005.
In the last few months, there have been two notable ripples in the stats pond: [Shaun Inman](http://shauninman.com) relased [mint](http://haveamint.com) and [Jeff Veen](http://veen.com/jeff/) [announced](http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000799.html) that he’d been working on a product called [Measure Map](http://measuremap.com) for [Adaptive Path](http://adaptivepath.com). Both promise well-designed and well-analyzed reports of your site’s performance; a more human approach to understanding who’s using your site and how.
Then today came the announcement that [Google](http://google.com) has launched [Google Analytics](http://google.com/analytics) and made it available to anyone for up to 5 million page views per month. Buy an AdSense account for $5 and you get unlimited page views, presumably even if you don’t put ads on your site.
Is this just a few smart people recognizing an untapped market or the start of something more interesting? And can we expect something similar from Yahoo! some time soon?

Not just iPods, actually, but that’s what made me think of it. My computer does it. My VCR does it. I’ve had watches that could do it. Why can’t my iPod? Any device that contains both date and time and has some embedded programming capability should know that it needs to change its clock when we enter or leave Daylight Savings Time. For example, my iPod should be smart enough to know that if I set my time zone to “Alaska”, it needs to adjust on the correct days. I shouldn’t have to go into a separate menu and change my time zone from “Alaska” to “Alaska (DST)” or back. That’s particularly stupid, because why not just go in and change the hour by one click instead of changing the time zone? It couldn’t take that much more programming.

Nice gallery of Buck Rogers comics covers from Australia

A very nice XHTML character entity reference chart