Fun With Feedjit

Just a fun little post today as I work on getting a few books moved along the production cycle.

Several months ago I installed a little widget at KidPub from Feedjit. It's a map of visitors. "Oh boy," you're probably thinking, "Another map with little dots. How very Web 2.0."

But wait! Apart from the fun of watching your visitors move across the globe with the sun, you can actually gather some useful information from Feedjit. Clicking on the small map will take you to your Feedjit site, which is a Google Maps mashup showing each visitor and (here's the fun bit) what they're viewing on your site. It looks something lke this:



A little hard to see here (click for full-size), but you get stats on what's currently happening on the site, including the most popular page views in the displayed geographic region.

I don't use it that often, but KidPub members like it, and if we've published something specific to a region it's useful to take a look a few times during the day to see if interest has been piqued. Its a good way to take a quick look at traffic, too. The performance hit is minimal as the geolocation lookup is done on the Feedjit side. You are handing a third party data about your users, but hey, we all sold our visitors' souls out a long time ago, eh?