I'm still getting used to blogging. There are lots of tools available to help figure out what's going on. (Thanks to PZ, and others for helping me get established.)
One of the tools reveals where readers are located. This is pretty amazing. Each dot stands for someone who looked at my blog in the last few hours.
I think I can see Wilkins from here!
ReplyDeleteBe careful. I don't know for sure what your tool is doing, but I am reasonably certain that it cannot actually "reveal[] where readers are located."
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I strongly suspect that each dot stands not "for someone", but for some host that sent a request to the web server on which your blog runs.
Further, while the software can make a reasonably good guess (though only a guess) as to the location of the host to which it sent a response, such a guess can be wildly inaccurate as to the location of the reader. This is because your server only knows where it sent a response; it has no way of knowing whether that is the responses ultimate destination, and therefore no way of determining the location of the reader.
Greg Byshenk
I suspect most of the dots truly represent the location of the reader, don't you? For example, look at the dot over Brisbane, Australia. Who else could it be but John Wilkins?
ReplyDeleteAnd look at the dot over Morris, Minnesota. Are you trying to tell me there's someone else who lives there and PZ is really in Hawaii or Reykjavik (or Arizona)? :-)
I wonder who's reading my blog in Leiden, Netherlands? Could that be you?
Since I discovered your blog it has become an additional obsession to read it every 3 hours
ReplyDeleteOops , I must take my pills
Of course it could be me in the Netherlands -- and as a matter of fact, it is -- at least at the moment. But I could just as well be connecting to my machine from Chicago (as I actually did less than two weeks ago) and be viewing your site from there.
ReplyDeleteAnd users of my machines at work would also show up as being "in" Leiden, even though some of them are actually elsewhere in the Netherlands, in France, in Belgium, or in Germany (and occasionally locations even farther afield).
That said, I would guess that the information is pretty close to accurate for at least 90% of your readers. I was just cautioning about reading too much into the information.
Greg Byshenk
I wonder who is the person in Colombia that read your blog. Or the one in some isle priximal to South Africa.
ReplyDelete