Monday, June 15, 2009

Trolling for South Pole Traffic

If life seems confusing at times— how would it be otherwise…
when we live on a planet that is bipolar

PM09'

I am a statistics hound. What I mean by this is that I like to look at Web statistics— things like how many people visited your site and from where do they come from. I found a nice paid service called Clicky http://getclicky.com/. For around $25.00 US per year you can find out who visits your site and their country of origin. Below is a screen shot of the country of origin of those that have visited my site during a given month:

If you look closely at the screen shot above you notice that there is something missing— Antarctica. One would think that if you can have a surgical team beamed to you over the Internet to help one of your fellow researchers— you can at least surf the Internet too. Yes I know that Antarctica is bound by an international treaty so that nobody owns it— but there are people there and they must surf the Internet. And if they can surf the Internet, they should at least have some sort of way so people know that you are from there. That started me thinking… why is it that they left out our southern most continent?

Many people are familiar with Santa Claus. You know… the guy who lives at the North Pole at some hidden castle and makes toys for children and delivers them all in one night. Well… there must be some Anti-Santa as well who lives at the South Pole. This is the guy who one night in the middle of summer steals back as many toys as he can. These are those toys that you must admit to your children were somehow "lost"— when in actuality you know that they were taken by the Anti-Santa but are too afraid to admit to your children about. Why then would this guy want his whereabouts to be known.

What you don't know won't hurt you— so if the entire continent of Antarctica were not shown, then people would not get curious and go looking for all those lost toys. All the more reason to exclude it from any Web statistics program out there.

Now I know that you exist. I have seen on many occasions IP addresses that map to nowhere, so I guess that you are visiting from our southernmost continent. Go talk to your fellow researchers and tell them to visit my site. I would love to have Clicky be brought to it's knees due to increased traffic— or at least be forced to add Antarctica due to popular demand. Get out of the tyranny of the Anti-Santa and let yourself be known to the rest of the world.

7 comments:

Melanie Jacobson said...

I love this anti-Santa theory. So creative.

I use Google Analytics, btw, and it does the same thing with the map plus it tracks all this other stuff, and it's free. Just fyi.

Barbaloot said...

Wish I could help---but I the best I can do is bring you stats from Utah:)

On another note---I didn't know Santa lived in a castle. I thought it was more like a mansion. Hmm.

Unknown said...

Anti-Santa...hmmm...
I love my Google Analytics. I totally blows my mind to think people in other countries visit my blog!

Anonymous said...

One problem with the tracking services (which I enjoy from Site Meter) is that the locations are not entirely accurate. I, of course, live in the Boise area. But I will often show up as from the south east coast. Larry's given me an explanation for why that is. But I cant remember.

Otter Thomas said...

Antartica is totally getting a bad deal. I am all for fair treatment of the freezing scientists and penguins.

Erin said...

Beautiful. Just beautiful. And I never thought of an anti-Santa. But it makes perfect sense!

Anonymous said...

Fabulous quote at the beginning!

Web Analytics