Site Meter's World Map, another new blog toy (thanks, as usual, to Barry Campbell of enrevanche, for calling it to our atttenton). Just click on "By World Map" in the left column under "Recent Visitors" at Site Meter to find out where in the world your readers are coming from and what they're looking for.
Site Meter Weblog explains World Map, the latest fun feature for finding tantalizing tidbits re who's reading your blog:
Each circle on the map is one visit to your site. I’ve color coded the points based on how recent the visit was. A red point is the latest visitor, a green point is one of the last 10 visitors and the white points are all the rest.
If you move the mouse cursor over each of the points, the domain and location of the visitor will pop up.
You click on a circle for details, including visit length, page views, referring URL and entry page. Our latest visitor turned out to be located in the Netherlands. We clicked on the red circle and discovered they'd landed on our post "Heads in the sand" through a google search for "karima belhaj" Karima is one of those Dutch fellow travelers who is still puzzling over "why they hate us," even as unassimilated Islamicists are murdering her fellow citizens in cold blood for exercising their right to freedom of speech.
Then there was the visitor from Riyadh, who was in for a surprise. Googling for "saudi women," he must surely have been disappointed to arrive at our post "What a Saudi woman wants, Part II," only to discover this opening quotation from Saudi internet iconoclast Wajiha al Huwayder:
Single life beats marriage to an emasculated man.
A similar letdown no doubt greeted the lewd and lascivious lurker in St. Petersburg, Russia, whose search for "girls must have fun lyrics" led him unsuspectingly to our sugar-and-spice category Girls just wanna have fun." We guess it depends upon what your definition of "fun" is. For us, double entendre headlines are right up there.