Editors spend a great deal of thought trying to figure out what their readers want. For newspapers, it's often hard to know what stories were read and which were ignored.
The "most popular" and "most e-mailed" lists on Web sites give some indication of what readers in that medium want. Earlier this year, the New York Times added a "most blogged" list of stories. Now the BBC is taking that idea to the next level. This part of the BBC site shows the most popular stories through the filters of time and geography.
I like the Traffic Monitor feature, too, which tells whether traffic is above or below normal.