Techniques that engage users with Web content are always worth exploring as are simple methods for capturing site metrics that help profile how your site.

My topic today, Cownter, is a service (in beta - of course) that allows the visitors to your Web site to see how many people are simultaneously viewing the page they are on. It also tells site owners who have implemented Cownter how many users visited specific pages.

Implementing Cownter simply requires signing up (for free) on the Cownter Web site, specifying the Web site to be instrumented, and then embedding a JavaScript fragment in each page that is to be monitored.

Setting a variable in the JavaScript enables or disables whether users will see a popup bubble showing the number of visitors on their current page. You can also include a control on each page to allow users to enable or disable display of the Cownter bubbles.

Site owners can log in to the Cownter site to view their statistics and Cownter also provides an API that allows account holders to retrieve their site stats using a simple REST interface. They also plan to make an RSS feed available.

Some ideas that Cownter offers for the use of the API are:

- You run a news site. The Giants game just ended and hundreds of readers flock to the sports article to read the play-by-play. Using the Cownt.us API, your site notices this trend and floats the article all the way to the front page. When the surge subsides, the site automatically adjusts and pushes the article back into the sports pages.

- You run a social networking site. Instead of showing the newest members, threads with the most posts or any other similar statistic, you can show real "buzz." With the Cownt.us API you can see what the people in your community are doing right now and change pages to dynamically adapt.

Cownter also suggests using its API so that your site implements its own look and feel for the Cownter usage data.

Cownter is an interesting tool and I could imagine it being extended to capture and report on a greater range of user activities. One interesting use for social networking sites might be to use the Cownter service to track user activities and then through the API color code pages according to “hotness.”

For now the service if free and the publishers request that if your site handles more than 100,000 users per hour you talk to them first. They also request that if you use the API more than 50 times per day you check with them first.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.