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The most entertaining way I ever saw to view logs was Visitorville-its kind of like SimCity meets web logging.

If you RTFA and follow the links all the way to the data you will see that you didn't follow the links all the way to the data.
http://intelligence.visitorville.com/top_referer.p hp?co=Microsoft+Corp

If you are going to tell people to RTFA please RTFA first!

Given the VisitorVille's error margins (e.g. +192.08%) their sample size is crap. Can I hotlink here? http://intelligence.visitorville.com/images/vvi-fr ont-tn.gif if not, just see their site.

1. Collect lots of logs with client IP addresses and User Agents from various popular web sites.
   Since www.visitorville.com is in the business of providing web stats, they are probably aggregating stats from many of their customers.
   
2. Get the mapping of which IP address blocks are owned by which companies.
   You can get them the registries (e.g., ARIN, RIPE , APNIC) by asking nicely and agreeing to use them for marketing.
3. Write some software that dissects user agents and OS from the User-Agent value and counts occurrences per per IP address block owner.

well, kindof.. So they track every user who visits a site running their web bug and they *could* sell that information to anyone.
BTW I hope they're seeing lots of slashdot tornado's and riots at the moment... :)

It's nice to see slashdot employees don't do anything on the internet :) Full company list is here by the way.

And IBM is using Windows exclusively?

I wonder why it doesn't show the top 5/10 visited sites.

It's nice to see slashdot employees don't do anything on the internet :) Full company list is here by the way.

And IBM is using Windows exclusively?

I wonder why it doesn't show the top 5/10 visited sites.

It's nice to see slashdot employees don't do anything on the internet :) Full company list is here by the way.

And IBM is using Windows exclusively?

I wonder why it doesn't show the top 5/10 visited sites.

No, its software. And as the poster above suggests, its licensed to one user (who runs the software - that can show the report to anyone they want) and three machines, which is more than you'd get with most software.

Besides, if it was a hosted service, what's wrong with charging more money to monitor more machines?

Judging by the screen shots, the primary way of representing site activity is skyscrapers in a rectangular city grid.

The city-grid metaphor fails to capture the essential hierarchical structure of a Web site

In addition, showing page popularity by the height of buildings favours pages that are designed primarily to route users to other pages. For instance, the home page would typically get the most hits.

However, the objective of a home page is to route users to pages that provide some information specific to their interest. These pages are inherently less popular but what the site manager needs to know is whether people who go to the home page are ultimately getting to the less popular pages that interest them further down the hierarchy.

In effect, it's the traffic between pages that's more interesting than the hits on the page. The service does provide this information but in a more conventional form of percentages and lists.

A pinball machine metaphore might be more useful with visitors represented by the pinball. The pinball should get through the maze of bumpers with as few rebounds as possible before exiting the game. If users spend a lot of time bouncing around, the site is failing to get them to the pages that interest them quickly.

Visitor Interaction

Initiate chat with any visitor to your web site. Plus, have them able to interact with you via Live Help. Your visitors are no longer mere IP addresses; they are alive, and now you can assist and engage with them simply by selecting a visitor and clicking "Chat" (and your visitors don't need any software, either!)

Or on the corporte lan where user Joe has a 'house' and all of a sudden cars and people are jamming around it (he just emailed a link to his beta web project stored on his local PC).

And the BOFH could stomp through as King Kong and wreak havoc on Jane's mail-merge (since she attached a 5MB file instead of linking to it).

If not already posted, check this summary here: visual summary

Ok, so who's going to use perl/php with Ming modules to do this? (or something better of course).

Here's a direct link to the screenshots.

It can even trace traffic flows. Neat stuff.

Here's a direct link to the screenshots.

It can even trace traffic flows. Neat stuff.

Visitorville's sure in for some real skyrises and bright lights today...here we come :)