Guess that's why they call it the World Wide Web...

It's a sad little fact that I am a stats whore - I really love knowing how many people are or (as is usually the case) aren't visiting my webcomics and reading them. To this end I use Extreme trackers on all my sites... technically it only measures hits to the main page, but I have my doubts. At any rate it gives me a ball park figure of traffic and soothes my need for stats.

Recently, Extreme started including little flags which, if you hover over them, give you the name of the country and location of the ISP. For some reason I find this wildly fascinating. The number of different countries I've seen listed has really boggled my brain - North, South and Central America, United Kingdom, Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Australia, New Zealand and various Asian countries. Can't say I've noticed Russia which is a bit odd. China and other communist Asian countries aren't represented either, but that's no surprise.

The US accounts for the majority of visitors to all my various webcomics, which I suppose is to be expected - it seems my work is more widely read overseas than here in Australia. That was a point I tried to impress on the many Australian print based cartoonists at the Supernova Pop Culture Expo late last year. They weren't all that interested in getting their comics online even though they were amazed when I told them how broad my readership was, but that's another story.

What weirds me out though is when I notice a little Australian flag - especially when I hover over it and it reveals that someone in Sydney has checked out my work. Makes me wonder if I've ever been in the same space as that person - like on the same train, or on the same bus, or in the same movie theatre, etc. As you can tell, I seem to have a lot of time for weird thoughts (see the 'walking' entry below, this seems to be when my brain does a lot of rambling of its own!).

Maybe it's just me but I do find it an intriguing concept. Did they like it, did they hate it? If I was in the same room and they found out I was the guy who did such and such a comic would they let me know what they thought of it? Actually it has happened a couple of times over the last few years, fortunately in all instances it has been positive.

Anyway, please don't think I'm spying on you, dear reader. The stats thingy doesn't give me that much to go on anyway and, by and large, I'm really only interested in the number of people visiting my comics. If you do visit any or all of them - thanks!