I Don't Know Where I'm Going, But I know Where You've Been

I love to write. I love to journal and record ideas, thoughts, connections, and opinions and at least for me, the whole blogosphere is just a big electronic and nicely portable journal. I say this only to emphasize that even if not a single person visited this blog, I'd still blog. Having said that, it's cool that people visit (even if by accidental click through). Inspired by Buzztracker, an interesting website and software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations appearing in English-speaking global news coverage, I thought it might be fun to take the numbers and locations tallied on my hit counter and "Buzztrack" visitors to this blog from where I write in San Francisco. Well, it officially stopped being "fun" after about 8 minutes.

I may blog, but I am completely illiterate in manipulating graphics software. I originally wanted to make the geographic locations of hits proportional in size to the number of hits, but that turned out to be a big pain in the ass. So I just mapped sites with greater than one visit, and made the top visitation sites–USA, China, Canada, and Australia–approximately proportional to number of hits. What an enormous time sink when I should be relaxing at home with my man. Manuel is already pissed that I come home after anywhere from 8-12 hours at work only to have dinner and then open my laptop and blog. What can I say, I have a passion for writing about what I do. But, there's a fine line between passion and obsession and I may have already performed a half gainer across that line a while ago.

Anyway, hope you enjoy my effort to map you out. Apologies to all you "single hit" nations. And I know that "hits" do not necessarily translate as "readers." My hit counter doesn't even show total visits, just unique hits. For all I know the bulk of hits to my site may be from pre-med students looking for malaria treatments. Then again, the 27 hits from Australia might represent one bloke with a computer fetish (I hope that's not you, Cam). I've included the 48 coterminous United States, but also included connections to Alaska and Hawaii. I have no confidence that I capture Alaskan hits, but know of at least one Hawaiian reader (Mahalo, Liz!). And part of my Canadian hits are a direct result of my Canadian Program Manager Sherry Flumerfelt's Toronto home-court advantage. Great blog, eh?

So while I know from where you "hit" me, I'm curious as to who you are or why you "hit" me. If you actually read this stuff or even subscribe to this blog, I'd love to know why? Other than the stunning prose and clarity of thought, what brings you back? Is it the pictures? I'm not hit trolling here, I'm genuinely curious. Okay... it's your turn to talk.