The Blogospheric Mirror

This entry presents some graphs and charts from SiteMeter that reveal some information about all of YOU who visit(ed) this blog, as of February 22, 2008. I figured it would be good to divulge some of the more interesting ones that I found among an assortment of different figures on my SiteMeter page.



The 1st chart of continental representation shows a lack of South Americans and Africans who visit my blog. Also, remember that the Middle East and South Asia are part of "Asia," making that the second continent after North America.




I suppose it's no coincidence that the 3 countries I have lived in recently comprise 84% of this blog's audience. Azerbaijan might be the oddest/most unlikely of the many countries that were "1%" of the total viewers.










As for the language chart, the various languages represent the internet browser setting and not the actual mother tongue or even primary word processing language. The Hebrew-speaking nation is a distant second to English, and the primacy of English on the internets is readily apparent. However, perhaps I should consider blogging in other tongues at some point. Farsi is perhaps not too surprising of a presence, due to the fact that Iran contributes an inordinate number of bloggers to the blogosphere.












In terms of Operating System, the minority players Mac OS X and Linux came in at 29% and 2%, respectively. These percentages seem to be slightly higher than those operating systems' share of the total number of operating systems used by all blog viewers worldwide.





As for the internet browsers, Firefox 1 comes in well ahead of IE 7, with 39% and 29%, respectively. However, Firefox 2 and IE 6 are tied at 15%, perhaps suggesting that a significant number of Firefox loyalists simply haven't switched to the newer version of their preferred browser. Netscape's browser, at 2%, seems to be a thing of the past. Safari (the browser that I will be switching to if this Firefox 2 keeps having bugs) was also at 2%.

Misc = Primaries, Schmap, Clock, and Map

This map and graph, courtesy of Wikimedia and the U of Iowa, respectively, depict the current status of the contest to select the Democratic nominee for this fall's American Presidential election. Barack Obama is currently leading according to the futures chart at bottom by a margin of over 2 to 1, after having criss-crossed with Hillary Clinton just over two weeks ago. As of now, Obama is leading by about 64 delegates. With almost half of the delegates not yet tallied, there is still a long way to go in this historic contest.

I did indeed vote for one of these two candidates, as part of the Democrats Abroad primary (which amounts to a total of 11 delegates that are sent to the Democratic National Convention in Denver starting on August 25th). In the map at left, these expat votes are shown in grey next to those for Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, and the Virgin Islands. Obama = blue, Clinton = Red, Edwards = green, stripped of delegates = black, and not yet assigned = grey. So, the 11 expat delegates have not yet been won. I must say that at this point, I am essentially indifferent to whichever candidate ends up as the Democratic front-runner, as long as the party successfully unites behind the chosen nominee and ushers him/her to the White House.

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Next of these several miscellaneous things - this phenomenal World Clock gizmo is one of the most interesting things I've seen on the internets in a while. You can set the timer by year, month, week, day, and "now," so play around with the different settings to see how fast the tallies rise and how many of the given events have occurred already in those 5 categories. I find it most fulfilling to press "now" repeatedly in order to constantly be aware of how much of each event happens every instant, even after you reset the clock. AIDS, oil, computers, births, species, etc...and after you play around with this world clock, check out the other "clocks" of time zone, U.S. crime, Christmas countdown, etc...This is a great resource.

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Schmap is a solid resource for finding information on activities in urban areas throughout the world. Check it out!

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Mal-connected:



If your computer's internet connection is as slow as mine at the moment (perhaps due to a cut cable thousands of kilometers away at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea), then you might want to perform a speed check on your connection. Hopefully, your bytes are flowing faster than mine were when this test was logged.

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Next is an enlightening map sequence from Maps of War that depicts the succession of empires that have ruled over the Middle East. It's rather insightful.