big brother is watching...

Find your state on the map above, and if it's not dark-green, you probably aren't reading this blog enough. Or else your in-state friends aren't. The map indicates the number of visits to our blog over the last week, and I produced it in the new beta-version of Google Analytics.

For those of you with blogs or websites out there, I hope you know about Google Analytics. It's a web-based tracker that helps site managers monitor how many visitors they get, what links get viewed most , etc. Like pretty much everything else Google does, it's free and easy to use, and -- hooray -- it just got updated. It was good before, I suppose, but now we can get a much finer-grained picture of where readers are (relax: just city names) and how long people hang out on our site (not long at all, I'm ashamed to say). If you are super interested, you can get even fancier: are viewers in Washington connecting directly or through other sites? And that's just the start. I'm geeked about the whole darn thing.

So, looking at the map, we can guess who many of you are, but we're kinda stumped about a couple. Here's a list of cities that are home to our most puzzling mystery lurkers:

Philadelphia
Honolulu
Denver
Ithaca, NY
Watsonville, CA
Louisville, KY
Wallingford, CT
Glassboro, NJ
Naperville, IL
Sydney, Austrailia
Manchester, UK

So...if you live in one of these places, it would be fun to know the identity behind the unexpected locales. Drop us a line or post a comment; lurk in anonymity no longer!

- Q