A WHOOP AND A HOLLER FROM WOOPRA

Like Google Analytics, which is also free, Woopra tells you how many visitors you have, where they're coming from and what pages they're visiting. But it goes way beyond that. Unlike most Web site analyses, you see a live count of your visitors on a map of the world, marked with glowing dots as people come in and out. You can click on any dot and choose "start a conversation" if you wish. This seems awfully intrusive to us, but Woopra executives claim people love to be stopped in their tracks and asked how they're enjoying the site. Of course this can help you understand what works and what doesn't on your site.

The map also indicates what keywords users are searching on in that area of the world. Looking at a test site, "OneMansBlog.com," we saw that no one was searching on U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in South America, but there was one search going on in Africa, and over a hundred in the U.S. On our own site, we were surprised to see it being read by people from many countries.

No information about visitors is collected beyond what is known to any similar service, but each Woopra visitor is tagged with an ID number. So if you want, you can set up an alert that tells you the next time a particular visitor is on the site. You can also set up other kinds of alerts. Find out every time you get visitors from Beverly Hills, or Timbuktu. You can get alerts identifying the user's native language. This may seem weird, but most browsers have this information.

Woopra is still in the beta phase and currently has 45,000 users. The company is only going to issue 5,000 more invitations before closing out the testing process so they can get ready for their official launch a few months from now.

THE 4,000 YEAR ROUND-TRIP

We couldn't resist looking at a new development in technology: the water clock.

The first water clocks date back to at least 4,000 years ago, and believe it or not, they worked pretty well. The slow drip, drip, drip of water from a large container into a smaller one caused a wood or cork float to gradually rise along with the water level. The rate of rise was surprisingly constant, and by making marks along the side of the container, the time could be read as the float rose to those marks.

The brand-new water clock we just got was from Bedol International, and it's really an electric clock. But it does run on water -- with a dash of salt. What it looks like is a translucent blue ball with a digital clock face on one side. There's a stopper on top, and when you pull that out, there's an opening for filling the ball with water. Add a little salt and you're off and running -- on the clock, so to speak.

Of course, what we've really done is create a battery, much like the one invented by Alessandro Volta in Como, Italy, in 1800. Two strips of dissimilar metals -- usually copper and zinc, or copper and tin -- are inside the blue plastic ball of our water clock, and the salt water around them conducts electricity. The passage of electrons between the two strips of metal generates a tiny electrical charge, enough to run a small digital clock. As we would say in Italian, "Ecco!": Here we have it.

The Bedol water clock retails for $16, from BedolWhatsNext.com.

INTERNUTS

BillShrink.com lets you compare your credit card or wireless service with hundreds of others without entering any personal information about yourself. We noticed that the credit card given best ranking depended on what your major spending areas were. In one case, it said we could save over $1,000 a year with a different card.

Labs.Google.com/InQuotes lets you compare quotes from the Presidential candidates, side by side, on major issues.

IT'S THE INK, STUPID

The new Epson Stylus NX300 is a combination inkjet printer, scanner, copier and fax machine, put together for the absurdly low price of $90. Models NX200 and 100 sell for even less. Of course the profit's not in the printer, but the ink. It follows the old Gillette Razor marketing model of "Give away the razors, make your money selling the blades."

What interested us most about this unit was neither the price nor the features, but the ink. Printer ink is outrageously expensive no matter what you buy. The dye for inkjets runs over $8,000 a gallon. What really interested us in this case was the durability. Epson claims that its ink is waterproof, or at least water-resistant if submerged, and retains its clarity six times longer than other inks. These are bold claims.

We've all seen that photos fade and old documents become hard to read. Epson claims that their new inks will retain their clarity for a hundred years or more. Now, no one has tried this out for a hundred years, of course, but results are projected from tests under elevated temperature and humidity.

The question of durability is extremely important. Businesses and individuals now routinely store pages and CDs and DVDs with the assumption that they can be archived and will last virtually forever. This is wishful thinking. Documents stored on disks can become unreadable within 20 to 30 years. Over time, the reflective dots on the disks become less so, making them difficult to read. Paper copies last longer, but archives should be printed on acid-free paper.

COPYRIGHT 2008 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE