I just added MapSurface to my weblog so any of you can see the traffic to-and-from my weblog. All you have to do is click “Alt-X” and a layer will appear and provide some really basic web analytics.

I won’t know how much I like the tool until I have some traffic but I’m very interested in the idea of transparency in web analytics. Imagine if every web site provided some level of detail on a per-page basis — unique visitors, visits, page views, top “X” referrers — so that everyone could validate for themselves how popular/interesting/valuable other people found the content they were reading. Sort of like the “Page Rank” thing you get in the Google Toolbar but not just for Toolbar users and not only based on Google’s measurements.

What do you think?