If you read my posts you know I almost had a meltdown when our widgets were not working...as a matter of fact I feel I need to explain. See my clustrmap, my geoglobe and mybloglog represent readers..visitors and people to me. Not just statistics...but readers and I need that reassurance..readers are reading!
As I look at these products I am truly amazed and I think about the mind of the creator..interesting right..and so different from the way that I think or maybe not. Well when you want to know something you just ask right? And I did..and with that said...pay attention to the mind of this greatness! Because to me..its very different than what I expected.
The CEO and creator of Clustrmaps..Marc Eisenstadt <<<Click the link<<< He is really amazing!<<<
1. Will you share a little about yourself? "I'm a lifelong-academic-turned-entreprenuer, now giving away and promoting widgets instead of publishing thoughts about (and studies of) the future of knowledge, learning and user interfaces - go figure! I keep a summary of highlights on my LinkedIn profile!"
2. How did you and your crew come up with the idea of clustrmaps? "I have long been interested in graphical visualizations, as typified by Edward Tufte's great book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin's wonderful Atlas of Cyberspace. Much of my academic work in the past involved developing tools to help novice computer users visualize what was happening inside their computer programs. In the mid-90's my research work moved into the direction of social software and 'presence', looking at ways to create a better 'community spirit' and a feeling of 'being there' during on line interactions with large groups - not by deploying Virtual Reality but rather through custom visualizations of symbols to depict moods, gestures and locations. We developed an idea called BuddySpace which essentially married location visualization with instant messaging, and grew a respectable user community in the academic world. That work emphasized real-time presence ('Who is on-line NOW?'), but it later occurred to me that 'offline presence' ('Who WAS there?') was just as interesting. It became apparent that SEEING the locations of your own website visitors in a graphical and intuitive way could be very informative and motivating, in fact even better than seeing the standard statistics provided by the big-name web analytics tools! ClustrMaps was developed as a way of showing off to your public readership 'impossibly many dots in an impossibly small space, all impossibly fast', because people enjoyed the motivation of quickly seeing visitor locations, yet without it being too intrusive."
3. I dream of having to pay for the pro version one day..believe it or not its a goal...who uses the pro version? Share a few of the big dogs, please???? "I assume you are talking about the "ClustrMaps+" version, which provides better zoomed-in maps and no ads for a small subscription fee (less than $1 a month if you take the 2-year option). Sure... there are a very large number of these. One of our biggest users in that category is www.educar.org, a Latin American e-learning and virtual education portal. They actually run a family of sites that all use ClustrMaps+. Another big user is Jesse Ferrell of Accuweather.com, who runs a great blog and weather analysis site. Jesse uses ClustrMaps+, and archives the maps afresh every single DAY so it is easy to keep track of the changing pattern of daily visitors. Another big user is www.hitsusa.com, a webmaster-oriented website traffic tips site, and then there's www.1800pocketpc.com that specializes in PocketPC freeware and Windows Mobile software. I could go on and on - we get everyone from bloggers to businesses, and a few very large media companies and even international retail outlets that obviously have their own webmasters and server analytics tools, but prefer the simplicity and 'gestalt view' that they get from ClustrMaps+. Some of these bigger ones pay for an extra license that entitles them to have a hidden map!"
4. I noticed that my traffic is coming from all over the world..do you have any suggestions to increase traffic besides writing interesting relevant content? "It's the old story: if you have interesting stuff to say, and stick with it consistently and over the long haul, the visitors will find you! Another thing that helps is being very active in the 'social sphere', getting out there and posting comments on other people's sites, not out of vanity but rather out of genuine constructive 'good citizenship', which will earn you strong kudos and reputation in a way that no amount of spam postings ever can.
And always leave links and tags back to your own site so that people can find you either through a blog trackback, through tagging, through Twitter comments, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles whatever - just make yourself accessible."
5. Is there a benefit to being on the top 100 Free Users list on your site? "Actually we list the top THOUSAND free users for the previous day, every single day of the year. This is purely out of interest: some people get a buzz out of seeing themselves up there, and its a good motivator for all of our users. At the same time, we are conscious of not wanting anyone to 'game' the system, and also to prevent monster sites from overwhelming the poor small blogger, so we actually do NOT show users who are too big, i.e. if they go over a certain threshold. They can view their own maps of course, but we just don't include them on the list (this is rare, incidentally)."
6. Mybloglog, Geoglobe and my stats from clustrmaps sometimes are different and I realize time differences...resetting etc.etc..is your stats based on a 24 hour period and/or timezone...can you explain?
"We take great pride in the accuracy of our visit counts, which is based on what is widely regarded as the best third-party commercial geolocation database. Different counters can come up with inconsistent totals for a variety of reasons. Most of us rely on similar 3rd-party databases to undertake the IP-to-geolocation conversion, and these tend to be updated regularly, but they are not all the same! In some cases it is possible to get very detailed statistics from log analysis software that analyzes hits to many pages on a site, whereas ClustrMaps only (and deliberately) counts the number of times that the ClustrMaps thumbnail map it is displayed!!
See "http://clustrmaps.wordpress.com/2008/12/22/clustrmaps-trumps-geovisite-amungus-feedjit-neoplanet/" a discussion of ClustrMaps vs other counters!
We intentionally assume 1 visitor per IP address per day, which is great for overall unique daily visitor statistics, but not if you want more fine-grained analysis that other packages provide. Some counters are (almost) real time, whereas we have typically a one-day turnaround: the difference between real time and delayed updates is simply a pragmatic trade off. We go for the visual gestalt, and massive scalability: no other system can yet show millions of dots the way we can. On the other hand this decision necessitates a trade off, and we have opted for the delays because we can get tremendous scalability from our special-purpose overnight batch runs. In the near future, we hope to be able to provide something like 'the best of both worlds', i.e. massive scalability and near-real-time reporting. Stay tuned!"
7. What are the biggest benefits you see using clustrmaps after all you created it? "For users, it is the sheer delight they take in watching and sharing the global village, and seeing 'in an instant' what their impact is. We have professionals from all different communities who paste their big world maps into PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate the impact of their work when they are seeking funding, for example. Sure, they can get the big statistics from other services, but nothing beats the visual impact, and ClustrMaps is something they can understand and install for themselves without having to negotiate with their own IT departments. We receive thousands of emails from delighted users, and we see many blog postings from around the world that are testaments to the thrill people get from seeing their worldwide readership at a glance, and in turn sharing that with each other. We have hundreds of these bookmarked on a Delicious testimonials site at http://delicious.com/clustrmaps/testimonials, but there are many more.
Read the reviews Just today, we helped out a user who wrote "Thanks again! BTW your map is my FAVOURITE widget!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" which is always great to see, and we recently had a school class in New Zealand bake a celebration cake containing frosting with a world map full of red ClustrMaps dots to celebrate their 20,000th visitor. You have GOT to see their story and photo: Clustrmaps Cake In School . That cake and the email from their teacher totally made my year - that is why we ClustrMaps: because of the thrill and motivation it brings to users. In fact, we also accrue a very modest profit, which is remarkable for a self-financed startup, especially in these times of economic recession, but I can honestly say that it is NOT money that drives us to deliver the kind of fanatical support we offer and attract the kind of end-user loyalty that we have seen."
8. I was excited that CJ (my clustrmap friend) left me a comment on one of my blog posts a while back..is that common and who is CJ? "As mentioned above, we take great pride in supporting our user around the globe, and this means 'beaming in' as often as we can on the sites of random bloggers who use ClustrMaps, seeing what they are up to, offering help and assistance where we can. The users love it, and the benefits in terms of good relations speak for themselves. CJ is one of our highly motivated team of part-timers who undertake our social networking support of this kind, and answer user emails."
9. Any SEO tips? "The web is full of great tips, and our style is simple: whenever the title, keywords, description, and actual content of a site all 'converge' on a core of meaningful terminology, without being overloaded by bogus keywords and tricks (that can actually count against you), then you will eventually move up in the search engine rankings for that core of meaningful terminology. It's simple, and effective!"
10. Last words? "Be true to your core aims and ambitions, be good to your users, get out there and make constructive comments on other people's sites, and help them to succeed in what they want to achieve, and you well find yourself well and truly into a very effective virtuous circle. It won't necessarily make you a zillionaire, but if the current economic crisis has taught us anything, it is that you need to re-focus on the core values."
If you do not believe that you have readers and from all over the world...I challenge you to install the FREE widget and track your visitors for a week!
You will see and understand how Clustrmaps served up over 4 billion maps and I personally don't want to ever go without my clustrmaps again!
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