Like it or not, web marketing is cutthroat, and search engine optimizers are always looking for an edge on the competition — open web statistics are an invitation for somebody else to eat your lunch.

Personally, I like Quantcast, which provides public statistics about the readership of web sites that are useful for advertisers and others, but that respect the privacy of webmasters and users.

It’s a really fun site that shows what can be done with Javascript in 2006. It turns out that Canvas performance is good enough in Firefox, Safari and Opera that simple 3-d rendering can be done in the browser. Unfortunately, it may be too late for Microsoft to add canvas support to IE, but the folks of Google have created a library that adds canvas support to Internet Explorer. Thanks to this, polyhedra.org works on IE, even if it is a little poky.