The 51st state, according to Sitemeter

According to the Sitemeter statistics, the blog gets a lot of visitors from outside the United States. If we ignore the Unknown category, the Internet service providers that are able to hide their country of origin from the Sitemeter software, there are visitors from around the globe showing up here at all hours of the day and night. If I check the pie chart at around sun up on the West Coast, the slice of the pie for the U.S. of A. can easily be less than 50%, though at around dinner time, it's common that the last 100 visitors include around 70% Yanks or more.

As I've said before, a lot of visitors find the blog because they are searching for images I've put up in the past or are hunting down topics I've written about previously. Whether it's giant women or the Pythagorean Theorem or the ever popular Alice the Snorg Girl, folks from around the globe are searching the Internet for something and they end up here.

Go figure.

Besides the pie chart, Sitemeter also has an actual list of countries of origin of the last 100 visitors. There was a strange discrepancy when this pie chart was made. The list included four visits from The Islamic Republic of Iran, though Iran does not show up on the pie chart. I went back to the list to make a quick count, and the Iranian visits were not lumped in with the Unknown category, but instead added the the United States total.

Very odd.

I get a lot of visits from places Americans would consider "repressive regimes", including Iran, Syria, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, China and others. Many of these visitors are looking for The Big Girls. (Welcome, brothers!) Oddly enough, I get a lot more visitors from the countries I just listed than I get from "liberated" Iraq or Afghanistan.

If we can take these statistics as meaning anything, and if I was teaching my statistics class I would say they can't be trusted because of self-selection bias, I would list three countries as the most restrictive to their Internet users, countries that have never sent a visitor here, even though neighbors of theirs who have about the same wealth level and population size have sent many.

There are three Flags of Many Lands™ I have yet to see that I attribute to repressive governments instead of relative poverty or small population.

North Korea, Cuba and Myanmar.