Yesterday wasoxygen and I had a discussion about the whereabouts of Hubskiers. I related to him what we know and what we don't, and thought it might be worth sharing with you all.
This is what we know:
I grabbed that map and data from our Piwik Analytics.
I've mentioned this previously, but we do not log your IP on Hubski.
We host Piwik Analytics on our own server, and we mask the last nine digits of your IP address (i.e. 198.xxx.xxx.xxx), so we can only resolve visits by country. We don't know what state you reside in. Piwik also expunges user activity data every 24 hours, and it respects 'do not track' requests.
In short, we don't want to know more about you than what you choose to share on the site.
This is so interesting... Hubski's policies on privacy are so far in one direction - but the level of intimacy I've experienced here is on an almost opposite end of the spectrum. I love that each of us gets to choose. For example - if I didn't know mk in real life, he would know nothing but what I've revealed about myself in posts and pictures. And yet, I didn't know thenewgreen before hubski, and he and I have had pretty in depth conversations about careers, family, etc. My favorite enigma is the fact that eightbitsamurai, rob05c, and beezneez and I live within 15 miles of each other... and have not yet been able to meet in person... that we know of. Maybe we once stood in the same line, or were stuck in the same traffic. I don't know either of their real names, but we could have sat next to each other on the bus. some day, maybe there will be a massive hubski meet up... some day...
The Hubski team is all in the US and Canada, and the first users were mostly based in the US. I assume that has influenced the topics, discussion, and hours of activity on the site. I'd love to see that percentage decrease, but I can't tell you what it was last year.
Yes, really. But today they beat out Italy. I know a couple of active Hubskiers are in Vancouver. Our GeoIP setting is the crappy default one. I wonder if they get grouped into Seattle? Ah yes, from our Piwik console: ... The default location provider guesses a visitor's country based on the language they use. This is not very accurate, so we recommend installing and using GeoIP. How does it differentiate US from Canada? Color vs. colour? Apparently, even what little we know is wrong.You do not appear to have accurate Geolocation setup. This is a useful feature and without it you will not see accurate and complete location information for your visitors.
Looks like the country stats track visits, not visitors, so it's possible U.S. users are simply more active. I was also curious to know what the most-visited posts are, but I respect Hubski's privacy policy. I realized that there are other ways to get that information, so here is the Unofficial Top Ten List of Popular Hubski Posts.