Looking at statistics -- or -- Fun with a pie chart

Here's a pie chart from my Sitemeter page taken yesterday. It shows the countries of origin for people visiting this blog.

Now it's not surprising that most of the 'hits' come from the U.S. This is a big country. I was actually surprised to see that only 6% of my 'hits' come from the U.K. because so many of my repeat offenders are from England or Scotland.

But the pie chart doesn't show how long people stay. Some 9% of my hits come from China -- and never a single comment. So I'm guessing my Chinese visitors are arriving mostly via the "Next Blog" button and departing by the same route. Perhaps my brand of humor doesn't translate well into Chinese.

I was actually surprised to see that 1% of my visitors came from Australia and another 1% from New Zealand. I've never had an Australian or New Zealander leave a comment either and, unlike China, there's no language barrier involved with these countries.

Well, not as much of a language barrier.

But the number that jumped off the page at me was that 3% of my visitors are from an "unknown country." Three per cent is a significant number; that's how many visitors I get from Canada, too.

So it wasn't just an error. I got all excited when I saw that 3% unknown country slice, thinking maybe that I was getting supernatural visitors.

Then I checked my Shakespeare: Hamelet spoke of "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns."

So that wasn't it. Even if we count Picard as posting from an unknown country (even though I have it on good authority his posts are routed from the 24th Century to England) -- he alone doesn't the entire 3% make. So maybe... maybe the visitors from the unknown countries really are from waaaaaaaaay out of town.

I just wish they'd leave a comment. I wish you would, too.