Picture this situation: you’re an author on a popular blog that’s published by several users; you’re wondering which author is getting the most views… Well now you can find out.

Today we’re introducing a new panel to your stats page, Top Authors.

Here’s how it works: all the posts that were visited during the day are counted up, divided by who wrote them. The author with the most visits across all his or her posts of the day, gets the top spot. Interestingly, the top spot is not about who wrote the most posts, it’s about which author wrote the posts that got the most visits.

To see each author’s posts, you can click the little plus icon to expand and reveal just what stories earned them their points of the day. Pictured above, the wonderful Jane Wells had just posted about the exciting new WordPress 3.1 features. Because that was a popular post, it earned her the top spot.

At this blog here, we don’t actively compete for the top spot (or do we!?), but other blogs might find these statistics mighty fascinating.

Because we liked the grouping feature so much, we also added it to your referrers box, which now bundles up links from the same domain.

The new panel is available for all blogs on WordPress.com. It will appear automatically if you have two or more authors with traffic on their posts. In the not-so-distant future, “Top Authors” along with the new look for stats, will be available for self-hosted blogs running the Stats plugin.