Internationalism

You may have noticed that on this Blog and indeed on my Website (which, mea culpa, I never seem to update) there is a small map of the world with red dots thereon.

This is provided by ClustrMaps and shows the geographic location (estimated by working out the IP address) of visitors to the site(s).

I find it fascinating that people from all over the world have visited this Blog and my Website, and I say visited because I'm not so arrogant as to think that if someone lands on the page they will think it's interesting enough to stay and read the bloody thing!

So, it seems that my Website and Blog have been visited by t'InterWeb users in the UK and mainland Europe, north America, south America to a lesser extent, what looks like it might be Iraq (hard to tell exactly where the dot is), India, South Africa, Australia, and China (although it seems that's confined largely to hits on the Blog, not the Website). Wow!

The top image on the right is the map to date for my Website, the bottom one's for the Blog. You can't really compare the number of hits fairly, because the Website's been up and running for longer than the Blog, but the ClustrMap figures are reset after a year, and the Blog has the advantage of being hosted by Blogger so inevitably lots of hits are via that excellent site. That said, the Website is featured on StumbleUpon so gets a fair number of hits via it.

StumbleUpon is a tremendous site for not only social networking (anorak alert!) but it enables you to Stumble onto pages which seem to be at random but in fact which are biased towards the likes and interests you register when you create an account (free) with them. When you see a page you like as you surf the Web, you can click a thumbs up button (or thumbs down if you dislike it) and the system takes this into account when offering you more pages to flick between. Sounds complicated. It isn't. Try it.