Most are in the English-speaking world--no surprise there. The top cities supplying the most visitors are, in order: Penza, Russia and Atlanta, Georgia. These cities account for the largest orange dots on the map. After the top two, we have New York, London, Oslo, Brisbane, Sydney, Austin, San Diego, Olympia, Seattle, Melbourne, Houston, Athens, "not set" (unknown location, due to privacy settings), Los Angeles, San Francisco, Paris and several other cities.
This data comes from google-analytics, a utility that many webmasters use to evaluate their sites. The average time spent on the site is the juiciest detail. If a reader spends less than a minute, then the site repelled him for some reason (poor design or content, most likely). The more time a reader spends, the better. I expected the highest average time to be from the United States, but was completely mistaken:
Countries where English is not the native language show higher average times. Those visitors require more time to interpret what for them is probably a second language, learned in school. In the same way, I would require more time to read a French site.
I'm not sure how to interpret all of this data, but I do like the idea of the blog being read in faraway places that I've never visited. I wonder what the reader in Bolivia thinks about the blog, for instance. Once, I wrote an article about the recent coup in Honduras. Someone out there replied, but their text was written in Chinese characters, and I could not publish it because I didn't know what it meant. I rejected the comment, but the person left a similar comment two more times, until I changed the settings on the blog to disallow anonymous comments.
The data itself does not tell me much, other than this site is good enough to capture attention for an average of 1.86 pages and 2.09 minutes per visit, which isn't too bad, considering most people click and then leave before a minute gets clocked. Servers may visit my site on a daily basis to scan for keywords for marketing purposes or to inspect the AdSense code. In some cases, they grab the text, create a summary and then put a summary of my content on a web page, along with summaries of content from other blogs, organized by key words. I think this technique is intended to generate ad revenue.
All of the data collected by google-analytics is technical in nature, and so of less interest to a writer than to a webmaster, who frets over whether his site plays well with all the browsers and screen resolutions. More interesting questions would be, what do the readers believe, and do they agree or disagree on this or that article? These are unknowns, although the data gives little hints.
What does screen resolution mean? In my experience, those with very high screen resolution are either involved with technology, graphic design or games; well-to-do financially, or both. High status has a strong association with high screen resolution.
All of these resolutions are about the same, in what I call the lower to middle-class spectrum of screen resolution. Only when I extend the list do I notice some unusual resolutions, such as 2560 x 1600, which indicates a power user, someone with an unusually expensive monitor. Today as I write this, such monitors cost eleven hundred dollars and up at NewEgg.com, although in the future they will become cheaper. Such a person probably has a fast internet connection, as well, such as a T1.
The smaller resolutions, such as 800 x 600 and 800 x 480, do not indicate poverty. Someone could be logging in from a mobile device. Also, I have noticed that many people, no matter how much money they have, just don't bother upgrading their computer. It's perceived to be a hassle. They use their computer until it breaks, and then buy a new one. Whatever screen resolution is on their new system, they will live with until the new computer also breaks. They just don't care about screen resolution.
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