My latest blog toy is from Feedjit.com. I noticed it on the blog of my fellow Iberian immigrant, Theresa. It will display a tiny map with dots showing where my visitors are coming from, as well as a timeline of recent visitors, and the pages they came from to get here. There are, of course, thousands of plugins and applications (I've even written one) that will give you this information, but I'm very impressed, so far, with Feedjit's interface. Adding it to a page or sidebar is nothing more than a script include. The Google Maps interface that you get when you click on the map is particularly well done.
Check out my map for today.
I assume that they only keep the data for a very short amount of time. I know from my experience in this field that keeping visitor data for much more than a couple days leads to a very full database. Recently, I've been very impressed with internet startup companies, like Twitter, that do one thing, and do it well, rather than try to be everything for everybody.
There's no telling how long this Feedjit widget will remain in my sidebar. I might bore of it soon, but for now, at least, it's a pretty fun little toy down there at the bottom of the sidebar. Anything that's good enough for the Holy Church is good enough for me.