Ever since Google acquired blog analytics firm Measure Map, the product vanished with only an email signup form left behind for people newly interested in the service.

 Almost five months ago, I and several other writers suggested that 2008 was going to be the “Year of Analytics”. As the year approaches the half-way point, it turns out we were collectively half correct. The first five months of 2008 have seen a great deal of attention granted to analytics and the companies that provide them.

"Numbers without context are just numbers," according to Matt Bailey, the founder of Site Logic Marketing.  So in a session titled "Web Analytics," Bailey walked an audience through what they need to know about their sites and statistics.

Google Analytics has some free competition, as Yahoo decided to open up the web analytics part of its latest acquisition for free to IndexTools clients and partners. We speculate as to why they are doing this.

Yes, that’s correct. Yahoo! has acquired IndexTools and now has become a major player in the analytics space. Google Analytics and even Omniture now appear to have another direct competitor in Yahoo/IndexTools – it should be interesting to see how Yahoo will market IndexTools in the near future. Eric Peterson, has a great follow up to this story on his blog, speaking about how this acquisition will change the analytics game:

Information about where and who view videos posted on YouTube will be easy to find thanks to a new feature called YouTube Insight.

The ROI of Search Engine Optimization, Usability, and Analytics.
I’ll tell you why I love what I do. I love helping other people be successful in their business. And this industry provides the tools for making an impact. Right now.

Compared to Google’s other offerings, Google Audio Ads has often been something of an unknown quantity.  Some ads played . . . some people came to the site . . . exact relationships remained mysterious.  But Google’s hoping to offer some solid stats through an integration with Google Analytics.

A new Google Analytics feature may take a few weeks to get rolling.  Once it catches on, though, the benchmarking service should give users the ability to compare their properties to other sites within an industry.

The majority of Google-related developments take place in or near Mountain View.  The company’s now trying to spread the love, however, and over the next few months, will be holding AdWords and Analytics seminars in five different places.

John Nack of Adobe posted a brief Q&A related to the issue of Adobe software welcome screens phoning home to a tracking site hosted by analytics firm Omniture.

The blogosphere has chattered about a study that found nearly three out of four people haven’t heard of Google Docs or other online productivity suites.

Another round of holiday goodies arrived from Google for webamsters, this time in the form of updates to the Google Analytics service.