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Google Analytics (GA) is a decent service for tracking activity on your site, however, there are times when it may be necessary to log some statistics yourself.

By its nature, GA does not include any information that would allow you to identify who visited a page or clicked a link. Also, GA does not give immediate updates - you have to wait up to 24 hours to see the current day's stats.

A site that provides recommendations to registered users may wish to log some of their own statistics (Amazon, for instance). An ad network may want to log impressions and clicks on their widget. What do you need to be aware of when logging your own stats?

If The Graduate were remade today, the advice to young Benjamin Braddock might be "just one word... statistics."

The explosion of digital data has generated a need for technology to store, serve, and analyze petabytes of data. But it's also creating a lot of opportunities for people who are trained in the field of statistics. And more and more, that training involves learning R, the open source statistical programming language.

Digg's users are still in the middle of their fifth major revolt on the site and the effect of this current uprising is now starting to become more apparent. According to the latest data from Statcounter, referral traffic from Digg to its network hit its lowest point ever on Monday, while traffic from Digg competitor Reddit increased dramatically. Statcounter's CEO Aodhan Cullen notes that "Abandon Digg Day" on Monday turned out to be a "Redd Monday" for Reddit.

Ever since the release of Apple's iPad, the only device making a significant impact in the tablet market, many have speculated about the possibilities for the the future of the publishing industry. Back in June we mentioned the early success seen by magazines and newspapers like Wired and the Financial Times, and more recently, the Flipboard app has iPad users drooling. With these trends in mind, a new study released today by Next Issue Media predicts that $3 billion will be spent on electronic publication subscriptions by 2014.

The explosion of "big data" has prompted many people to ask the question "How will we store all this data?" And while cloud computing offers the promise of infinite scalability for storage, the Biocep R Project hopes to address two related questions associated with the growth of big data: "How will we analyze all this data?" and, more importantly, "How can we analyze it virtually?"

According to some analysts, Apple is now selling more iPads than Macs. Judging from the latest survey data from ChangeWave Research, the demand for Apple's tablets in the U.S. will only continue to grow. About 7% of all respondents to ChangeWave's survey said that they were "very likely" to buy an iPad and another 13% said that they were "somewhat likely" to buy one. The large majority of iPad owners said that they were "very satisfied" with their purchase, though about 11% cited the lack of Flash-support as their biggest gripe against the iPad.

In December 2009, mobile search engine Taptu found about 326,000 touch-optimized mobile sites on the Internet. By April 2010, this number had grown by over 35%. According to Taptu's latest report, there are now over 440,000 touch-enabled sites on the Web. The annual growth rate for touch-friendly websites is close to 230%. In comparison, Apple's App Store is currently seeing annual growth rates of around 144% and the Android store is growing at around 400% annually.

According to a group of researchers at Korea's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Twitter is not a very social network. After analyzing over 41 million user profiles and 1.47 billion follower/following relationships, the researchers concluded that only 22% of all connections on Twitter are reciprocal. On Flickr, this number is closer to 68% and on Yahoo 360 it's 84%. The large majority (78%) of connections between users on Twitter are one-way relationships.

According to this year's Edison Research/Arbitron Internet & Multimedia Study, Twitter has now reached the same ubiquitous brand awareness in the U.S. as Facebook. In 2008, only 5% of the U.S. population was aware of Twitter. Today, this number is 87%. Only 7% of Americans actually use Twitter, however, while 41% have a profile on Facebook.

On Twitter, there are just five degrees of separation between you and almost everybody else on the service. After analyzing over 5.2 billion friend and follower relationships on Twitter, social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos determined that nearly everyone on Twitter is just five steps away from each other, and about half of all the people on Twitter are separated by only four steps.