What Visitor Map to Use?
I’ve been looking at blog maps for one that does what I want. It doesn’t seem to be too much to ask…
- Free!
- Shows the visits on the map
- Tracks visits for at least a month
- Counts the total visits
- Zooms in or identifies towns clearly
- Widget thumbnail image scales well in the sidebar
- Doesn’t distract the user from the blog post
ClustrMaps.com is good on #s 1, 2, 3, 4 & 7. The free version doesn’t zoom in at all, and you get no idea of whether people are repeat visitors; it scales horribly. the thumbnail image is not designed to be scaled to other widths.
Whos.among.us is good on #s 1, 2, 6 & 7 – no information is provided about #3, but it’s been running for at least 3 weeks. It doesn’t count total visits, just how many are there at the same time – pretty useless for people who are happy to see a couple hundred visits a month – all I ever see from them is ‘1’. It does tell me how many visits I’ve received from a given city (so it’s obviously keeping track of the visit count!), but because it doesn’t zoom in, I can’t be sure I’m seeing all the cities – they’re overlaying each other. It scales well in the sidebar.
In some desperation, I’ve tried NeoPlanet – a widget that spins. It’s also free and that’s where the good bits about it stop. It shows the visiting locations, but doesn’t count them; doesn’t zoom in on them; doesn’t identify states or cities; doesn’t stop spinning, and doesn’t scale at all in the sidebar. So it’s only good on #s 1 & 2 – again, no idea about #3, and regarding #7 the spinning is way too intense! In fairness, this site also provides NeoEarth, which displays a static map of the world – but like GeoVisite below, the free version only tracks data for 24 hours.
I found another one today called GeoVisite. It’s free; counts all visits; zooms in several levels; identifies countries; pre-fitted to the sidebar; very modifiable. Beautiful world maps to choose from. Just one problem: it only holds 24 hours of info. Gack! So: #s 1, 2, 4, 5 & 6 are good; There’s some distraction (#7); #2 is the deal-breaker. I sent them an email to confirm.
I also discovered FeedJit today. #s 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 good; #3 still something of a problem. it has a map widget that shows the last 100 users, regardless of time period, and when you click to get the large map, it shows the last 1,000 users. (FeedJit also has a widget that shows info about the most recent users.)
So the best-looking widget is undoubtedly GeoVisite, but unless they can fix the 24-hour issue, I’ll stay with ClustrMaps. Meanwhile, I’ll leave the others up – maybe you should vote in the comments…!
[After the response in the comments (below) from the folks at ClustrMaps.com, I've gone through this post and corrected a couple of things - notably the spelling of their name and site (the link was correct, since I grabbed it from the address bar). Also, they were also quite correct in noting that I was talking about the scaling of the thumbnail image in #6, not the data within the thumbnail or the data on their page after you click through the widget. It's also appropriate to note that I scaled the first two maps (that I was playing with a few weeks earlier)to fit the sidebar and not the last two (that I added as I was searching for maps for this post), so - at least for now - I'll undo the scaling on all of the maps. But the OCD in me does like to fill the whole width of the sidebar!
Lastly, anyone who takes the trouble to leave such a gracious comment deserves decent consideration about adjectives as well. I find that when I'm writing a post I focus in on the point in question and all things become relative to that focus. Scales 'horribly' was one such adjective that I've changed, but I'll leave it up here as a reminder to myself that words on a blog need more care than those in a conversation. In fairness to the other providers, I've gone through and moderated a couple of other words as well...swg]
Mike Killiany (Mike Roots)
fred
Frank Ramsey
Hi Steve – this is a neat and concise comparative analysis that you’ve done. On behalf of the ClustrMaps Team, I wanted to ‘beam in’ here and make a few observations that I hope will be helpful:
1. Firstly, for even undertaking the analysis at all, we have just awarded you afree upgrade to ClustrMaps+ status (better maps, zooming to continent-level, no ads). The better maps will appear after the next overnight update.
2. Your point 6 (’scales well in the sidebar’): because we are the most scalable geographical counter (in terms of being able to show off millions of dots), you can imagine that we’re quite sensitive about this! I see what you mean though: the THUMBNAIL IMAGE does not scale. That is because it is fixed size because of our obsession with speed – you get everything from us instantly, which is why we pre-compute everything overnight. Others that use Flash (for instance) give you image scaling very nicely – so naturally we’ll be providing that (as well as custom thumbnail sizes and colours, etc) soon – stay tuned! MEANWHILE, I’m wondering if I could ask politely for you to make a minor edit to your ’scales horribly’ remark, since I almost fainted when I saw it. The thumbnail map is simply not design for ‘image scaling’ (fair enough, good point… but worth a minor clarification – thanks!).
3. As you can probably tell, we have a fanatical devotion to our enormous user base, ‘beaming in’ to users around the world to interact with them: we believe this is another important discriminator from the other widgets out there!
4. Since you have displayed some other widgets in their ‘official’ size (like Feedjit), we’re wondering if we could politely request that you do the same for ClustrMaps (160×106), at least until we provide the custom thumbnails that I mentioned above! This will reflect better on both your site and ours!
5. Finally, on a minor point, please note our spelling (deliberately without the ‘e’): ClustrMaps
Looking forward to hearing your reactions.
With all best wishes,
-Marc Eisenstadt
ClustrMaps Ltd
p.s. we noticed that you have your archiving set to ‘monthly’, presumably deliberately in order to get a ‘clean slate’ each month… this is fine, and we just wanted to point out that with the ClustrMaps+ upgrade we’ve just awarded to you, you also get unlimited archiving of all your monthly maps, i.e. including each continent map as well! The same would be true for any archive period you choose.