As seen on Slashdot and elsewhere, the current storm in a teacup is that Firefox will support a ping attribute for link tracking.

I wonder how many of the tech-heads who are ranting about privacy concerns also rushed to sign up for Google Analytics?

We’ve been choosing a web analytics firm for work and compared with the sort of stats that are already tracked on all major sites (and cross sites when advertising, affiliates, etc. are taken into account) this is nothing; and it will be (a) technically cleaner and (b) faster and less obtrusive for the user. Not a big deal.

The shocking thing from my point of view is that I’d never heard of the proposed ping attribute until now. Must catch up on the WHATWG specs.