If 75 percent of my day is spent writing, the remaining 25 percent is probably going over TechCrunch stats. I&'m obsessed with it. That&'s why I do so many posts about things like Chrome getting ready to 'overtake Firefox as the dominant browser among TechCrunch readers (less than 1 percent away now). So I was obviously happy when WordPress.com (which hosts us) overhauled their Stats area earlier this year. But it was always missing just one thing.

WordPress.com&'s Stats area gives you a solid overview for how your blog is doing overall. And unlike Google Analytics, the data is up-to-the-minute fresh. You can see your top posts, top referrers, top search engine terms, top clicked links, and a few other things. One thing it doesn&'t have though is the ability to see how each author is doing in terms of traffic to their posts. In other words, it&'s lacking in the vanity department. But that&'s coming shortly.

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg shot us over a quick snapshot of the new feature that they&'re cooking up. As you can see, it will be a new box that shows you the Top Authors alongside the others like Top Posts, etc. The top ten list also shows you corresponding traffic numbers (I&'ve removed those in the screenshot) and apparently the total number of your posts getting traffic on any given day (at least I think that&'s what the number is parentheses is).

Obviously, I&'m happy because I&'m at the top. But that&'s just for today (plus, I clearly have a huge back catalog, so it&'s a little unfair).

Sure, there are a range of other plug-ins for WordPress that offer similar functionality, but now the vanity element will be fully baked into WordPress&' real-time analytics system. This is a nice addition for larger multi-author blogs. Previously, it has been kind of a pain to get these numbers in an accurate way.

Mullenweg notes that this feature should roll out in the next week or so.