A few weeks ago I added “ClustrMaps” (I don’t think a singular form exists) to Mayron.net. You can see it in the sidebar. It was inspired to add it after seeing one on Oge Marques‘ blog.

While this type of information is available to anyone who has access to the IP addresses of those that visit a site, I thought it was interesting enough to share these locations. The service appears to do a decent job at filtering out the IP addresses of known spiders and other automated agents, leaving behind mostly legitimate hits.

Many of my former colleagues from MLAB at FAU have been traveling abroad this summer, to places such as China (Beijing), Malaysia, Austria, Brazil (Curitiba), and Colombia. Hits from all of these locations show up. The largest concentration of hits is in the vicinity of Phoenix, AZ, although I’m not quite sure why (perhaps there’s an ISP based there that isn’t being filtered yet?).

It’s interesting to contrast the new ClustrMaps with the Guestmap I’ve had on my site for over six years (a link to the Guestmap is just below ClustrMaps in the sidebar). I only recently moved the Guestmap to the front page — it was previously buried on the About page. Unfortunately, the Guestmap only retains the most recent 100 entries, so many have been deleted. The Guestmap asks users to manually select their location and add an entry — only a fraction of visitors will do this. An example of a more modern implementation is Frappr.