As blogging increases in value — and more people come online as evidenced in Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere — giving people the tools they need is critical. Statistics on pageviews and referring pages that brought people to a post or a blog is one thing (as long as they’re working), but with the acceleration of use of news aggregators, it’s absolutely imperative that a blogger knows how many people have subscribed to their RSS feed and are reading posts through an aggregator!

Here are two examples:

1) Pageview/Referrer Stats: Typepad (my blog hosting provider) has had outages recently and their customer’s have not been happy. Though Typepad offered compensation after their first major outage, I find an amusing lack of transparency in this company and also a woefully inadequate use of the tools they sell. For example, their statistics have been offline quite frequently over the last several weeks. On January 26th, stats were down and they refer customers to a SixApart status page where it said this:

Jan 26, 2006
TypePad Service

We have temporarily disabled the display for visitor stats in the app. Status updates to follow.

Updated 1:26 pm PST

It was like that for 17 hours before I emailed Barak Berkowitz, Chmn/CEO of SixApart (though heard nothing).  Why does this company not blog and keep their customers informed? Are they afraid of being found out that they’re not yet reliable or can’t really scale yet?

Stats are table stakes to be in the blogging game and bloggers need to know who is reading, where they’re coming from, what search strings in a search engine brought them there and more.

But there is another HUGE area where Typepad doesn’t even play!

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