Hit Counter 2.0, Or "Web 2.0 Metrics"

Way back in the early days of the Web (you know, before AdSense, blog spam, web mail, and dynamic HTML) were these things called On Popularity: At one time it was common to see a hit counter on every page, but this is no longer the case for several reasons:

They have been replaced (or augmented) by more complicated web analytics methodologies that give the webmaster a better overall picture of site traffic besides a simple, perpetually increasing number.

As style elements, they are no longer associated with the impression of professional web design--some people consider web counters to be a "gimmicky" feature and they are thus typically found on personal pages created by individuals.

The number of visitors to a site may be a trade secret

Too small a number might indicate the page's lack of popularity. Removing the counter thus levels the playing field.
On Trust: Web counters are not necessarily trustworthy. A webmaster could start the counter at a high number to give the impression that the site is more popular than it actually is. Heh. You think? Web 2.0 Metrics I present this little walk down memory lane because it's related to something I've been wondering about. How the hell do we count stuff in a zero page refresh Web 2.0 buzzword compliant world? Evan Williams recently declared

comScore and Where Are The Web 2.0 Audits? Want to start a business that is desperately needed? Get into the Web 2.0 auditing business (or perhaps that's Auditing 2.0). Just as with the last bubble, it's reached the point that you can't trust any of the numbers that are being floated concerning today's popular sites. Of course, we've covered repeatedly how questionable the valuations being tossed around are, but to support those bogus numbers, it seems that there are all sorts of other bogus numbers being thrown around as well. Want an "old company" example of where this could get interesting? Thoughts? Jeremy Zawodny's blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Jeremy Zawodny's blog