Monday, March 26, 2007

Which people? How strange. (3)

Knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand,
while imagination embraces the entire world.
-- Albert Einstein

Cheryl and occasionally speculate about the varied audience looking at these pages. I have noted previously the surprise we get when someone unexpected knows some detail about our lives that could have only come from here.

Recently, I installed a little plugin from Clustrmaps.com that has a map of the world with little dots representing the locations of computers which have been used to access our page. There have been some interesting surprises. You can see the map at the bottom of our front page.

I suspect that from time to time, a search engine computer or spambot runs around the internet harvesting email addresses and such things. Moreover, some people stumble on our page after internet searches. Some may be looking for us, some may not. This month, my stats report tells me that our page has been clicked through after searches for "parsons-sheldrake", "jeffy", "nevablue", "sheryl sheldrake", "ursula catan" and "eureka backyardigans". It's interesting to see that there have been hits from India, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

For me what's more interesting is where there are multiple hits. Big dots appear over Vancouver, Southern Ontario, Ireland and Boston (all places where we know people). The mystery spot is on the Western shore of Hudson Bay, somewhere near where Manitoba becomes Nunavut. I don't know anyone there. That I know of. And yet we have been visited at least ten times from that location.

So either there is some internet traffic passing through there, or we have a fan up North. If you know who this is, or any of the other mystery spots, feel free to let us know. I'm interested.
posted at 12:05 AM