Grace and I are in the Thistle Hotel, Trafalgar Square, London. Microsoft has invited the leaders of all the SBS Groups around the country to a 'community planning day'. Tonight is a getting-to-know-you session over dinner and beers. Talking to Angus from MS we suddenly realised we had a mutual acquaintance. Then later, one of the group leaders, Feridun, knew someone I used to work with. It reminds me of an incident a while back when I was on temporary secondment in San Jose, California. A group were going out to dinner in the evening and we swung by a hotel to collect the last person - at the checkin desk, by pure coincidence, was a friend from back home in the UK.
Angus says there are only 5 degrees of seperation between any two given people. That is, take any two people in the world, and you should be able to find a link between them (friends, relatives, friends-of-friends, etc) that gets to within 5 degrees of arc. Well, I think I can believe that. The UK is only about 5 degrees accross, a bit more if you widen the scope to the whole British Isles. So that's already true for most people in the UK. Bridging the Atlantic doesn't seem that difficult. Without even thinking about it too hard, I can link myself to people in Canada, Australia, Phillipines, Dubai, California, Hawaii, Japan, Belgium, Hungary, Holland. That's just people I have met in person. Imagine if I included all the people I get to meet online!
Well, not so much who is visiting but where are they visiting from?
I was reading John Howard's blog and I noticed his post about Cluster Maps. What a great idea! Just add an HTML snippet to your web site and instantly start collecting an overview of where your site is being viewed from, around the world.
The map displays as a thumbnail image and can be clicked to zoom into a world map.
Great idea, and it's free (for less than 25,000 hits per day).
How to insert a ClustrMap in a SharePoint site
Easy, just use the Content Editor Web Part (see screen shot). In the web part properties, click on the Source Editor... button and past in the HTML provided by ClustrMaps. If you place the image where the Site Image normally goes, as I have in the screenshot, it might look best if the Frame Style is set to None.
To center the image in the web part, click on the Rich Text Editor... button, then click on the Center icon: