Phillip,
I am something of a sceptic about all sorts of metrics, including the traditional ones. We need to measure, that's for sure, and our customers (advertisers) demand it. Larger print magazines live or die by the Print Measurement Bureau readership stats. But nobody truly believes that every copy Outdoor Canada has 18 readers; it's only useful as a comparator with all the other measured magazines and an indicator of trends, up or down. The methodology puts magazines on the same plane as other media like radio and TV.

Online, whenever anyone asks me for data, I can give them things that seem to satisfy them, such as how many times someone has clicked on their ad and presumably read their message. They also seem satisfied with visitors and page views, which seem a reasonable indicator in about the same, inflated way that PMB numbers do. And, over time, tracking those things gives you a trend line. In the case of my blog, since March 2005, traffic has grown steadily from an average of 0 visitors and 0 page views to where, in the month of June it had 19,000 visits and 24,000 page views.

In the scheme of things, those are tiny numbers; I would argue that anyone should take them with a grain of salt (though, I can prove where many -- not all -- of them come from). But given the very specialized nature and small potential audience of a blog like mine, the numbers are pretty good. I don't dote on them, but I pay attention to them from time to time.

Frankly, if we had the kind of metrics that were truly meaningful, such information would probably require such an intrusion into readers' lives that they would be turned off. So we live with the methodologies we have.