Videos of user activity - useful feedback tool for webmasters - As a webmaster, one of the most difficult but most important things you do is try to understand how your users use your site. Traffic measurement and analysis tools like <a href="http://www.google.com/analytics/&quot; target="_blank">Google Analytics </a>and <a href="http://www.woopra.com/&quot; target="_blank">Woopra</a> help with this. But <a href="http://clicktale.net&quot; target="_blank">ClickTale</a> attempts to go a step further by actually showing you videos of what your users are doing on screen. You can see how they move their mouse and how the scroll up and down the page. Watching this can be almost as good as conducting a focus group (which tend to be biased) and can be invaluable as you attempt to improve your product.

ClickTale is not a perfect product. In setting it up I had a number of problems getting the videos to record and play properly. Also, it doesn't store what users type into to search fields, and other text boxes (which would be useful). The service is free, but for only 100 recordings per week (but it is <a href="http://www.clicktale.net/subs/Plans.aspx&quot; target="_blank">relatively cheap</a>). But altogether, if you run a website, it's worth giving ClickTale a try.