Saturday, July 17, 2010

Who wants to see me?

It's interesting to see where my visitors come from. I think we tend to take the "worldwide" part of WWW for granted; remember that just a few short years ago, communicating with people around the world was a very expensive proposition. Nowadays, we can call most countries for <20¢/minute and, very frequently, a mere 2¢/minute - like most European countries. And, of course, other forms of communication (emails, SMS, photos, video, you name it) are virtually free on the worldwide web!

Why do I bring this up? I just took a look at the stats for my site, which shows where my unique visitors come from, and how many ("unique" means number of different visitors, not the number of times they visit). Besides the U.S. where, of course, I have hundreds of them (not possible to say who, where or when), here's a breakdown of my international* crowd:

South Africa (ZA)3
Canada (CA)3
Germany (DE)2
Netherlands (NL)2
Italy (IT)2
United Kingdom (GB)2
Australia (AU)2
Finland (FI)1
Bulgaria (BG)1
Saudi Arabia (SA)1

I find that impressive. Well, I can understand it's not a big deal for you, but for me it is - so there!

* International - Why, oh why, has this word - at least in the U.S. - come to mean "foreign"? People use it when they talk about someone or something that is foreign, i.e. from outside the U.S. Think about the real meaning: just look at the word. There's inter (between/across two or more things) and national, referring to a country. Thus, it really means something else - like "between two countries." So please don't say "most of my friends are international" when you really mean "most of my friends are foreign." Thanks! (OK, so it's just another pet peeve of mine. I know.)

No comments: