19 February 2009

1000th British Visitor

The independent automatic tracking system Flagcounter has just registered the 1000th individual visitor from the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland (UK).

Though the number of British tourists visiting Ireland is down now significantly - due to 'credit crunch', economic crisis and the more than 20% drop in value (and spending power) of the Pound Sterling to the value of the Euro - I am pleased to see that our neighbours to the East and North are still visiting this humble weblog as frequently as usual.
And you are of course as welcome as always, regardless of crisis and 'credit crunch'.

Since I began writing this weblog nearly 14 months ago, UK visitors have been constantly the third-largest group of readers, with a current share of 12% of individual visitors*.

The largest amount of individual visitors - currently 41.7% - come from the USA, which has been in the lead from day one, followed by readers from Ireland, which make up currently 19%. Given the fact that the Republic of Ireland has only about 4.2 million inhabitants (compared with over 300 million in the USA), the share of 1/5 shows that our own people take a fair interest in what I have to say.

More surprising I find the fact that positions 4 and 5 in the ranking of individual visitors are held by Malaysia (currently 9.9%) and Singapore (currently 4.6%).
Although I visited these two countries in South-East Asia regularly when I was based in Hong Kong and Thailand, this is a long time ago and I don't usually write about that part of the world on this weblog. The interest of these Asian readers in Ireland and my writing is appreciated even more and they are most welcome. I read Asian weblogs myself and think that knowing more of and about each other can only improve the state of the world and the spreading of new ideas in the interest of global peace and prosperity.

Very recently the system also registered my first ever readers in Uruguay and Venezuela, and I can only hope that my Views from the Emerald Isle will find even more interest everywhere in future. Everyone is welcome here, regardless who they are and where they are based.

At present the various tracking systems I use here have registered visitors from 113 different countries - from Afghanistan to Vietnam - plus 58 computers registered by the EU organisation.
There were also 763 'hits' whose identity and nationality could not be identified by the tracking systems and thus are listed as 'unknown origin'. Maybe some of them come from various intelligence agencies like the American NSA and CIA, or the Russian FSB (the successor of the KGB), who have the technical capacity to hide their IP addresses and surf the web frequently.
Well, who ever they are, they are welcome to this weblog, and I hope they will find it worth their while to come here and read what I have to say.

The Emerald Islander

* Every single computer in the world has an individual IP address (or registration number). This unique IP address is the basis for counting individual visitors. Repeat visits by the same reader, or someone else using the same computer, are not counted. They are however registered in the overall statistic by a separate system that counts the number of 'hits' the weblog receives from any visitors.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is not quite true that every single computer has an individual IP address in the sense of a unique identifier. For example, if this blog were accessed by 10 people using 10 different computers on the same network (as might be the case in a library) they would present to the Internet the same IP address -- the address assigned to the network. (Within the network they would have IP addresses that are unique within the network but are not visible on the Internet.)

THE EMERALD ISLANDER said...

This is correct. A local area network (LAN) as one can find it in public libraries and also in various companies would use one IP address for the whole network. But this is no problem. It only means that I might have had actually even more individual visitors than the system identifies by using the IP address.

I tried to keep the post above relatively simple, without too many technical details some people might find complicated. The main point is that there are more than 35,000 'hits' and individual visitors from 113 countries. This I find quite extraordinary, and I would never have expected such widespread interest when I started the weblog.

Thanks for your comment.

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