Last week, during the Vintage Tub & Bath Dinner, Hitwise won a link from the SEOmoz blog. But, in typical Rand fashion, I decided that rather than simply point a bit of traffic their way, I'd do a real, constructive, signally post using some Hitwise data.

Below, I've looked at several commercial sectors on the web that have recently seen entrances by firms in the "Web 2.0" space. Hitwise provided their traffic data, and I pulled some stats from Yahoo! and Technorati to help provide a deeper look at what we're seeing from these firms:

Travel:

• Farecast - offers airfare predictions
• Kayak - compares fares from aggregators and airline websites
• Sidestep - as with Kayak; a comparison engine

Wikis

• Wetpaint - A hosted wiki solution
• Wikispaces - Also a host of wikis
• Wikihow - A wiki article website

Bookmarking Tools

• Del.icio.us - a social tagging and sharing tool
• Bluedot.us - also for social tagging
• Ma.gnolia - social tagging, sharing and unique media creation

Tech News

• Digg - the social news & voting site
• TechCrunch - Michael Arrington's popular web 2.0 blog
• Techmeme - Gabe's kickin' tech news tracker

In general, these charts suggest a trend that many have commented on in the Web 2.0 world - a single market leader with several "also-rans" in the space. Obviously, our sample size is too small to reliably back up this guess, but it makes for fascinating reading for us data geeks.

Hitwise is pricey - $20,000 a year minimum to be exact (maybe more at this point) and it generally sucks for calculating traffic to websites receiving fewer than 500K-1mil visitors per month, but for macro trends, they've got some very cool data. Along with information like the trend charts above, you can get:

• Downstream data - telling you what search terms and URLs sent the site traffic over  time
• Upstream data - where visitors from the site went next
• Keyword research - they have a separate KW research tool that rocks, but don't offer it separately from the main package (which I've complained about many times)
• Rankings of sites in a given sector - from most popular to least, giving you an idea of who you might be competing with that you weren't previously aware of
• Tons of other spiffy information

Hitwise is pulling their data from the collected logs of ISPs - companies that provide Internet access to homes and businesses (and then track every little thing you do). This data is aggregated, so there's no worry that you might be outed for surfing Care Bears fan fiction in your free time (or discover that your office mate, Ted, is doing it), but it does come from real visits. The inherent bias centers around which ISPs provide data to Hitwise - geographic, cultural and demographic bias have all been seen in Hitwise's stats, but never refined to the degree that we could actually say - "OMG, they buy Roadrunner and Comcast and Qwest in the Southeast, Midwest and the suburbs of Boise."

I have access to some Hitwise through some clients who run it, but haven't personally subscribed - it's useful for a large business, but like any other statistical data, you need to be prepared to use it effectively and watch for errors.

Congrats to Hitwise, BTW - way to have your ticket number called

BTW - Does anyone who reads SEOmoz use Hitwise data? What do you find useful about it?

Update: Rob from Vintage noted that Hitwise IS now offering keyword research access separately at http://www.keywordintelligence.com/