For a recent project, I was surprised to note a near total-dearth of statistical charts for two areas of internet usage which one would expect to see widely available.

The most surprising omission is the limited reporting available on peer-to-peer network traffic. For something which is widely cited as being the largest single component of internet traffic in terms of bandwidth, there is surprisingly little easily-available consumer-friendly data available online.

BigChampagne currently offers a measly single chart tracking music available for download. The company has come under some fairly stringent criticism for methodology and other things, though.

It appears that Redshift Research once provided something similar, but ceased doing so in summer 2004.

The other area of data which is missing is time-period keyed comparative information concerning blogosphere topics. Technorati and others do a good job tracking real-time stories and links, and provide some gross over-time data.

Presumably, both Daypop and Technorati have plenty of historical data. The specific information I want to see is similar to the information which Google presents every month and end-of-year, but with more contextual data, like film and music metric charts, noting a story’s longevity and motion in-chart.

Ideally, I’d like to see these charts available like this weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually. If traffic reporting in addition to link reporting could be factored in, that would be even better. Add bandwidth consumption, and I’d say that’s a pretty complete package.

Of course, the same is true for the P2P stats.