Big day in the analytics world - NetIQ spins out WebTrends and then Google announces it is acquiring Urchin. Eric Peterson of Jupiter Research has details on the NetIQ move here. Pretty much everyone has the same press release facts about Google and Urchin. Ultimately, I find the Urchin acquisition more interesting, in large part because I think it has the potential to make web analytics approachable to many small website and blog operators who've relied on pretty primitive tools (by comparison) to date.

I have a commercial license for Urchin that I use to track activity and perform analytics on my company's website. We've used it for years and it has evolved in that time into a very powerful tool. Recently, the company moved into the hosted service space with the release of Urchin 6 On Demand bringing down the price point by removing the need for your own dedicated hardware (and providing more of a head-on challenge to the WebTrends hosted option).

It will be most interesting to see how Google ends up using this latest acquisition. Peterson offers three scenarios in a post on his blog calling one of them "truly terrifying".