Where In The World You're Reading New World Notes

This is quite possibly fascinating only to me, but here's a recent side-by-side comparison of Alexa-ranked traffic to this blog versus Second Life's official site.  I never would have imagined New World Notes drawing more readers from Japan than the US-- or for that matter, more readers in Saudi Arabia versus, say, Belgium, Brazil, and France, which all boast a large Second Life presence.  What's going on, do you suppose?

Comments

[Tateru Nino]

I think it more represents the skewing of Alexa-users who are reading, rather than the distribution of all of the readers. Your HTTP blog logs would be the definitive source - Alexa can only assess a specific subset, as I understand it, so you're actually getting your demographics mixed in with theirs.

[Hamlet Au]

I thought Alexa also used spiders along with their toolbar thingy, no?

[Tateru Nino]

The spiders can't tell where users are coming from or how frequently. The only authoritative sources information about requests would be the toolbar (which covers Alexa users only), or the HTTP logs on your server - unless Alexa's done deals with ISPs to spy on traffic, and even that would only be partially successful.

As far as I know, Alexa basically extrapolates toolbar data with a bit of black magic and goat entrails to come up with guesses.

[Hamlet Au]

That would just deepen the mystery, Tat, because far as I can tell, Alexa doesn't have a Japanese-language site, or any other non-English mirror. Why would non-English speakers have an English-language toolbar on their browser?

[Dr. Darien Mason]

As for the spike in Saudi users, the articles on The Mosque in Chibi and Jihad in Second Life are likely reasons.

[Brigitte Kungler]

Have you tried feedjit? http://feedjit.com/ . It is a widget that shows you exactly where people come from.

[Tateru Nino]

Most Japanese users I know use English tools. In many cases there simply isn't any localized equivalent.

[Hamlet Au]

But why would more Japanese than American browsers be using Alexa?

"As for the spike in Saudi users, the articles on The Mosque in Chibi and Jihad in Second Life are likely reasons."

That's a plausible theory, but I wonder if it's more the hot avatar babes. From what I've read, Saudi Internet use skews heavily toward cheesecake (models, actresses, and of course porn) for obvious reasons.

[Tateru Nino]

Does typepad allow you access to the raw logfiles?