One thing that's interesting about blogging is the fact that it allows you to instantly reach people around the world. Anywhere that someone has an Internet connection, they can find and read what you've written. It's a very powerful concept.
But it can also be challenging to figure out just where your readers are coming from. Sure, if you're running your blog on your own domain, you can check the web server logs, or if you're lucky and your hosting company has a good stats package, you can start to get a better idea of where your visitors are coming from.
Myself, I wanted something that would give me a simple picture of where my visitors were coming from. For the last year or so, I've used a service called ClustrMaps for this. ClustrMaps works fine, and is pretty simple to use, so up until recently, it was fine.
A few months ago, one of my fellow developer evangelists, Brian Hitney, shared with me a project he'd been working on called WorldMaps. WorldMapsx addresses the same problem space as ClustrMaps, namely mapping website/blog visitors through IP lookups. WorldMaps also offers several advantages over ClustrMaps:
A bonus for me is that because WorldMaps is developed by one of my colleagues, I have been able to directly influence its development. In fact, WorldMaps is early enough in its growth that I'm sure Brian would welcome feedback from anyone who's using the service. You can view my WorldMap here, or just click the thumbnail in the News section of my blog.
So if you're looking for a way to view your visitor statistics visually in terms of where your visitors are in the world, and what percentage of your readership comes from what part of the world, WorldMaps is definitely something you should check out.
That's a cool idea, and I'm going to look into it.
I do wonder, can/does he filter IPs from online agregators, such as Yahoo. The reason I ask, is that I use Yahoo mail, and their RSS feed reader (built into their Beta) for all my RSS reading. I would assume that their IP is what logs at his end unless (like now) I come directly to your blog.
@M Kenyon - As I understand it, what's getting measured is requests for the map image (he also has a non-visual image for those who want to track stats without showing the map), so I don't think RSS hits are being tracked. I can check and find out for sure, though.
Andrew is correct ... right now there is no filtering, and generally RSS requests aren't counted unless you are including the map or pixel in your post, since aggregators will only pull the raw RSS feed and not what is on your site.
Filtering is certainly possible, though, but not currently done.
I’m currently working on a concept called a “subsite key” – for example, the traffic would all aggregate as part of your main feed as it does now, but you’d also be able to filter based on a user-assigned key. How is this useful? Suppose you include such a unique key (such as your permalink) in your blog post, and include a Worldmap pixel in that post. You’d get all-up stats on your blog, but then you could potentially filter based on individual blog posts or categories/tags, so you could get an idea as to how traffic is influenced by what you write.
You are correct though that the IP of the requestor is what is used. So if MSN or Google hits your site with a bot, you’ll see that as traffic _if_ the bot requested the image. This is often _not_ done, especially if the image is from a 3rd party (me, in this case). It is completely possible to filter these (at any time, I can go back and scrub the data) but right now it is not doing that. It’s also possible to toggle this, so any known bot addresses can get filtered or unfiltered, but still logged.
I've seen a huge spike lately in WorldMaps traffic -- no doubt in part thanks to Andrew for talking about it in his blog! Thanks Andrew!As the hits and new users are pouring in, I've noticed two trends that I need to consider.
GeoCoding IP Visitors by Brian Hitney