An international reader pool?

The Stranger in Bangkok blog has been created for more than half a year now. To be really honest, my principle goal of setting up a blog is to keep myself in touch with my friends, to provide an avenue for all who remotely care about me to see what's happening to me. In other words, it's used to prevent myself from disappearing from the surface of the earth since I am no longer staying in the country I grew up in.

My other equally significant driving force is to give my readers an insight to the Land of Smiles. Bangkok is a place where everyone frequents, but working here and trying to enjoy life like a local is different from coming here for a short shopping trip. Since I arrived, I have weathered floods (which Singaporeans are currently enjoying too), uprisings, curfews and thus done my fair share of blogging on these issues too.

This essentially means that I have designed my blog mostly for my really good friends and relatives in Singapore and Malaysia. However, a month ago, google gave its bloggers like me a chance to have some detailed breakdown on our reader statistics, and I have been mesmerised by the numbers ever since. I have cut a shot of my breakdown for the last 7 days so illustrate my surprise:



Firstly, I had 117 hits in a week, which to me is not too shabby a number considering there are close to 20 reads a day on the average. However, the most astonishing thing is that my readers from Malaysia and Singapore only make up an astounding 35% of the hits. I fully expected it to be nearer to...... 80%?? Incredibly, hits from the United States are running a close 2nd to that of Singapore, and I get hits last week from the Netherlands, France, UK, Canada and the Waka Wakas in South Africa. In my history, I got hits from Hungary, Croatia, Russia and even Fiji. I do understand that I have friends spread all over the globe, including some in the above stated countries, but still to me, this statistic is nothing short of incredible.

Of course, other interesting stats would be that there are more Firefox users than IE users, and I've had only 2 hits from the Ipad, I do expect this statistic to give me an indication of the success the Ipad team has achieved over the coming months.

I would like to thank the Blogger team for giving us such a wonderful tool for us to analyze our reader break-down, and I would like to also thank my friends who have been visiting my blog once in a while. If you are not my friend but is finding this blog any bit interesting, do drop a comment because I would like to be your friend.

With such a diverse pool of readers, you can expect the Stranger in Bangkok to remain highly active for some time yet.