World Blogger

/ Jeff Cann

Map

Greenland! Bah! My biggest failure. Does anyone even live there? This is a map of my blogging world. If the country is colored, someone in that country has read my blog. Or at least they’ve landed on my blog. How many actually read it? I need better analytics to answer that question.

Last week, I read a blog-post that showed a similar map. The blogger was further along than me. He had Greenland! But his map also showed a similar white-spot in the middle of Africa. I asked him if he was bothered by his lack of success there. His reply: “I’m not after world domination, just yet.”

Well I am.

Everyone needs a hobby. Something to motivate them, something to obsess over. Right now, for me, It’s my blogging map. So I wonder: why hasn’t anyone from Greenland viewed my blog? It’s a big country–I thought–massive. Almost the same size as the whole continent of Africa. Way bigger than the United States. This got me googling Greenland.

This is what I learned. Maps lie. As it turns out, the world map, the one I grew up with, the one WordPress uses to show where our blogs have reached, is spatially inaccurate. The continent of Africa is fourteen times bigger than Greenland even though they’re portrayed as the same size on the map. I have no idea how this happened. Maybe they initially took one of those maps, drawn by explorers in the 1700s, and never updated it.

Still, no page views? Google tells me that Greenland, over 800,000 square miles only has 56,000 people. It’s about as populous as the University of Central Florida. 0.0007% of the world’s population lives there. No wonder no one has visited my page.

And what’s that island just to the east of Greenland? No page-views from there either. It’s Svalbard. I’ve never even heard of Svalbard. 2,667 people live there. It’s a “Norwegian archipelago.” Right, I had to look that up, too. An archipelago is a fancy word for a group of islands. I’m not sure why Svalbard isn’t counted as part of Norway, but in the WordPress world it’s not. 2667 residents. Do they even have internet in Svalbard?

No one has ever visited my site from Mongolia either. Mongolia is a good sized country, a little smaller than Greenland. They have thirteen million citizens. Aren’t they interested in what I have to say? Do they care about mental health or running or parenting or blogging? These are some of my search tags. Does nobody in Mongolia care about the Hair Wiz–I get two or three hits every day from people looking up the Hair Wiz. Some even leave comments. 

In truth, I’m shocked by who reads my blog. When I created it, I thought it would appeal to a dozen people, all in the eastern United States. People just like me. Middle-aged men. Parents of teens. India holds my third highest readership. India is an exotic country, a half a world away. I’m not sure how my blog would be relevant to residents of India. I’ve read some Indian blogs. None of them seem all that relevant to me.

I’m consistently amazed by how much of the world speaks English. Because I’m getting page hits, that means people are searching on my keywords (Hair Wiz). And because people from eighty percent of the countries in the world are making these searches, it seems that most of the world has at least two languages under their belt. Only a quarter of Americans speak a second language and the majority of those are from families that emigrated to the United States in the past two generations.*

I’d be curious to see the maps of bloggers from other countries. Are they as skewed towards United States readership as mine? Over half of my page-views come from within the U.S. I personally read some international blogs, and it seems like most of the readers, the ones who leave comments anyway, are from the U.S. as well. Is WordPress skewed to American readers because it’s an American platform, or is blogging more of an American pass-time. If you asked me to name the most narcissistic nation, I’d say it’s the United States. And what could be a more narcissistic hobby than blogging: Here, let me tell you all about myself.  

I’ll continue my quest to conquer the world. I’ll even use clever tricks like putting Greenland and Svalbard in my keyword tags. And once I get those missing Euro-nations under my belt, I’ll set my sights on Africa. I have a lot of work to do there.

* I actually made up the statistic about when dual language speakers came to the United States. But of all the Americans I know who speak a second language, they only do so because they or their parents came from somewhere else.

68 thoughts on “World Blogger”

  3. I’ve been to Iceland, where everyone is tri-lingual–Icelandic, Danish and English, but not Greenland. If I get there and have internet access, I’ll help you out.

    I do get a kick out of where my readers and hits come from, its pretty fun.

    I’m semi-fluent in Spanish, as many of us in the SW us are. It was routinely taught in school starting in 3rd grade when I was a kid. About 43rd generation immigrant, though (okay, overstated, but the latest arrivals were two sets of great great grandparents.

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    • Based on this map, the most misleading sizing on the standard map seems to be Africa. I’m not one to seek out conspiracies, but this would seem to be a bunch of Caucasians trying to downplay the global importance of people of color.

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      • I’m pretty sure you’re kidding, right? The map is distorted because the lines between the poles are not parallel — they converge at the poles. So to show the image of the surface as a rectangle, everything north and south of the equator is gradually “spread out” visually. Africa straddles the equator and so is closer to “actual size” but is gradually distorted too. If you want to see accurate proportions, look at a globe.

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        • Hmm. Kidding? Maybe not. I knew the map was inaccurate due to the fact that they are putting a sphere on a flat surface, and I guess I intuitively knew that Greenland and Africa weren’t the same size–hence the desire to google it. But no, I honestly thought Greenland was much bigger than it is because of the way it is shown on the map.

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  7. On a roll now, Jeff.

    Just looked at the all-time map for Vinyl Connection, which, to be fair, has been going a lot longer than Lonely Keyboards. Though there are over 40,000 views, guess what?
    Greenland = 0. And a huge swathe through Africa is blank as a hidden continent. Not even a peep out of Madagascar.

    Got Mongolia though.

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  9. I’m facing similar problems with Greenland and Mongolia. However my biggest absent country for a long time was surprisingly China. I really had to work for it. I don’t know if I’d call it world domination, but I am pretty opssessed at the moment.

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  10. You have twice as many on your map as I do. It’s amazing to me that so many people around the world read English well enough to peruse our blogs.

    Several years ago, someone from China looked at almost every page on my site. No comments, no likes. It worried me! Stealing my work? Stealing my identity? I’ll never know.

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  11. According to Wikipedia in the Greenlandic language Greenland is called Kalaallit Nunaat. You could start including that in your posts. I don’t have any visitors from Greenland either.

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  12. Pingback: Does anyone have a Greenland, or a Chile? – My Fragmented Narrative

  21. Oh my gosh you are so awesome! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 I am having a world blog party on August 3! Feel free to drop your blog link and get to know other bloggers from around the world! Visit us and follow us for the posts at bloomsandbeautifuls.wordpress.com
    Also check our latest post that tells what time the party is!

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  22. I’ve been pretty obsessed with checking my map recently – I still need Greenland a little of South America and a fair bit of Africa. I try NOT to count my countries as once or twice the count goes down which just proves I’m rubbish at counting! 🙂

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    • There are no bloggers in Greenland, I’m convinced. My map is unchanged since I posted this (several months ago). I feel like I’ve gotten all the countries I’m ever going to get. On the bright side, I’ve learned a bit about world geography through this process. There are a lot of countries I’ve never heard of. Thanks for reading and commenting. This post has become my most popular.

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  23. The reason for the distortion of the Mercator map is interesting — when you take a sphere (think an orange) and peel it, then lay it flat, you decide where to cut it. Because mapmakers were Americans they made the cut between the US and the USSR. Also, as a previous commenter pointed out, this distorts most away from the equator. But I still think making Africa smaller than it should be was also just fine in that era! Where and how you peeled the orange and cut the peel was subjective, i.e. biased toward the U.S. and Europe.

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    • That other commenter was a little harsh. Recently, my son found a computer app where you could grab any country and drag it around the map to see how the perceived size changed. It was really cool and very eye opening. But without a doubt, there’s some white, western bias put into our map.

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  24. You have at least brought Svalbard some much needed attention. I had not heretofore heard of it. I have now Googled it and am aware that it has an arctic climate (Spitsbergen does anyway), swings between long, dark days in winter or the ‘Polar Nights’ and periods called the ‘Midnight Sun’ which probably sounds warmer than it actually is. The fact that it is primarily a coal mining export suggests that at some point in the future, it will be completely abandoned unless tourism spikes in experiencing the sun at midnight becomes the rage. These are all things I did not know or even think of before you introduced them to me. My only regret is that I am not from Greenland.

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