h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Yos,

I was wondering if you keep statistics about where on the planet your h2g2 researchers reside.

A map of the world showing the mass of researchers by country percentage could prove informative and fun.

Just a thought. Keep up the good work.

Grahame

Good idea - we'd like to do something like that.

One of the first things you learn when dealing with web stats is that geographical info is just about the slipperiest data you're going to deal with - unless people tell you directly, it's pretty hard to work out which country they're coming from, let alone which city. Looking at domain names isn't enough - many British ISPs have .com or .net addresses. Tracing IP addresses or looking directly at address records in the WHOIS database is better, but still not great. And AOL, of course, confounds this by having *all* their users (including UK) go through the Virginia servers, so you've got no chance of finding anything there.

So, there's no surefire way of getting accurate geographical data. Most of it's guessing. However, I do get a rough idea of which countries hold most of our users. US and UK are at the top of the list, obviously - then Australia, Canada... Germany, Sweden and New Zealand seem to be giving us similar amounts of user sessions too, though that's not a great indicator of actual numbers of users.

Of course, the best way of doing it would just be to ask our users directly where they live! It's something we're probably going to do in the future (but it'd almost certainly be optional - we realise lots of people are careful with their personal info). Then we can draw a big map and stick lots of flags on it! I'm looking forward to writing the code for that.

-- Yoz

Thanks Yos, bigger deal than I realised