From the "And Now For Something Completely Different" department we have Clustrmaps. Clustrmaps is in fact a service that provides a visual representation of your Web site's user location statistics:
While Clustrmaps is basically the same basic information about your visitors that you can find in a Web stats page, I include it here not only for its "oh, cool" factor, but also because it links Web stats back to one of the things we'd discussed in the first lesson, and that is so-called Web 2.0's support for social engagement over the Internet. By sharing information about the geographic region of visitors around the world, one can effectively encourage users to discover each other, or at least discover their shared or disparate locations.
The UK Open University uses a similar tool on it's LearningSpace Web site. LearningSpace features opencourseware, which is static learning materials that are freely available to the public. The UK Open is going a step further by encouraging users of its opencourseware to connect and engage on a social and an academic level. To this end it's implemented a tool that shows current logged-in users by geographic location, and allows users to connect via a built-in messaging tool:
What other user experiences might one create based on the visitor data found in Web stats provide? I think we've only scraped the surface of what might be done, and I encourage you to explore some of these ideas in this week's discussion forum.
return to top