8.22.2006

Finding out where a blog is based through its visitors


If cyberspace has no geography how can you explain this map? (Sorry about the obvious Mercator projection.) Map produced in Google Analytics.

This blog gets several dozen visitors on a good day and the map above shows where they come from. The most striking thing to me is that they center on SE United States, even though my blog is not about the SE, nor have I discussed where I am located, apart from in the blog description.

Is it because I've blogged about Atlanta in the past? But the above map only shows visitors in the last few days and other data I have shows that visitors have not been reading older blog entries.

So what explains this pattern? Here it in more detail:



Yes I am in the SE but why are visitors coming mostly from the SE but not reading any SE related articles? How is there, in effect, a big target over my location from the pattern of visitors?

Update: The commentator below asks how many are from myself. Bingo. That must be it. I've excluded my own visits from the sitemeter counts, but didn't do that for the Google analytics. I've tried to do that now and we'll see if it makes a difference (the two places do it in very different ways. Basically with Google you have to exclude a specific IP address. I think sitemeter uses cookies).
But still, it's a good surrogate measure of where a blog is located in real space.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I guess my question would be how many of those from the SE are you visiting your own site?