1. Free!
2. Shows the visits on the map
3. Tracks visits for at least a month
4. Counts the total visits
5. Zooms in or identifies towns clearly
6. Widget thumbnail image scales well in the sidebar
7. 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]