ReadWriteWeb

In a blog post from 2006 titled, "The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy," Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki wrote, "you cannot drive your competition crazy unless you understand their strengths and weaknesses." Kawasaki undoubtedly knows what he's talking about, and his advice - while almost 4 years old - still rings true today.

If you've got a great idea for a startup, knowing as much about your potential competitors is invaluable, and the people behind Competitious know this as well as anyone. That's why they created their handy application for keeping close tabs on the competition.

StatCounter, one of the larger free online stats services, just released a new online research tool that monitors the market share of search engines, browsers, and operating systems. StatCounter Global Stats' focus is different from other services like Compete, Alexa, Google Trends, or Quantcast, as it doesn't break out data by specific sites, but only focuses on these high-level statistics. StatCounter's data goes back until the middle of last year and allows you to break the statistics down by continent and country.

://URLFAN is an indexing service which ranks websites by popularity, based on blog mentions. It's been around for a while, but we think it's reached the point now where it's a very useful tool to measure influence on the Internet. ://URLFAN is similar to Alexa and its measurement of popularity is reminiscent of Google's PageRank. ://URLFAN also has similarities to Technorati, except that instead of indexing just blogs - ://URLFAN indexes all websites.