Woopra on Google Earth
I like messing around with software, trying new ideas and pushing it a bit beyond the limits.
I saw an interesting idea the other day for people who have Woopra Analytics in their sites, and Google Earth installed. It’s a very neat integration of the two.
Essentially, all you have to do is add a Network Link to Google earth in the format http://localhost:9565/yoursite.com, obviously entering the appropriate site name. Give it a low refresh rate (five to ten seconds) and sit back.
The effect is quite mesmerising.
As visitors arrive on your site, so little pegs appear on Google Earth, giving the visitor’s identity and their location.
The above snapshot shows three simultaneous visitors, where two are overlapping.
Needless to say, the location is actually the location of the ISP, so for example Grandad appears as a Dublin location, which is incorrect, but is near enough on a world scale.
As an application, it is not really of much value.
But it’s a lot of fun to watch in a busy period!
Provided of course your visitors don’t block woopra, google-analytics etc like I do!
I noticed you slipped in under the radar! Any particular reason for blocking them?
Initially it was because some of them were having serious imapct on page load times for some sites. In addition from using google analytics myself I found it to be lacking severely in functionality because quite a few visitors would have javascript disabled.
In the end I just like messing with the heads of people who rely on such things. Mind you I did like the realtime feature of woopra but the novelty wore off after a while.
Despite it all though, personally I prefer parsing the actual logs of a site. Much more meaningful and reliable. Having said that, I do run my own analytics site using Piwik which is handy sometimes to compare and contrast with the raw logs. So I guess I prefer being personally responsible for the data that’s collected. I have an inherent distrust of google and other third parties that I find impossible to shake!
I added Woopra after I read about it on Grandad’s site ages ago, then like Robert, I dismembered it because I was having page load problems (unrelated to Woopra.)
I just reactivated it a few days ago, and now read that they are out of beta and probably will want to charge to use their service.
BTW: If IJustMadeLove.com ever becomes real time…
Robert – I know a few people blamed Woopra for the terrible speed (or lack of) of the other site, but in fact it has virtually no impact. The problem I have with raw log files off a WordPress site is the sheer volume of files served up for each page load. The figures I get off the log files bear no relation to any other analytics software?
Sixty – They are out of beta all right, but unless you have a hell of a lot of traffic, the free version should suffice?
Don’t understand this stuff, but does that mean that you could add a network link to Google Earth with anyone’s website name on it and watch where their traffic comes from?
Unfortunately not! You can only pick up links on sites that you have registered. Life would be fun otherwise!