Welcome to the Small Web Experiment

The purpose of this experiment is to have people from as many countries as possible access this site, at a very short time frame.

Why “Small Web Experiment”?

Because “Small World Experiment” was already taken. When I first had this idea (this morning), I thought of calling it “Small World Experiment”, but I quickly found out somebody else beat me to it.

In any case, my experiment is very different (it’s not academic, for starters…), and “Web” is more appropriate then “World”, in this case.

How do you plan to perform the experiment?

I’ll start by emailing my friends and family. Hopefully they will be kind enough to read this, and decide if they want to forward the link to their friends and family. That’s the tough part.

The data itself is going to be gathered by Google Analytics.

What will we find here?

A graphic visualization of the results of the experiment. A daily update will show a map of earth, where visiting countries will be marked in green.

Here is a small sample:

I hope you will see daily updates, but this all depends on the success of the experiment.

Also, feel free to say hi. You can use the comments for this.

Why do this at all?

I’m looking for new projects from time to time, and I especially like to collect data. I keep track of my network usage, of the temperature of the computer, and other useless data. Why? I don’t know. That’s just me.

Just to be clear: I don’t have a lot of free time on my hands, and I’m not doing this for any possible profit (there are no ads on this site).

What are your expectations?

I can only hope for some success. I know people don’t like “chain mail”. I hope this won’t be perceived as such, because if it is, it’s going to be doomed from the start. If all goes well, I would be able to reach the goal of “global domination” in a week or two. Otherwise, it would just die. Quickly.

Are there any secondary goals?

There is one pretty serious secondary goal. I have a blog, which doesn’t have too much visitors. Since October 2007, people from all over the world had a quick visit to my blog, including people from the USA. However, there was one oddity in this aspect. There were no visitors from Montana. Each state had at least 1 visitor (a total of 1271 visits from the USA), but Montana had none. Don’t believe me? Here is the proof:

This has been bothering me for quite some time, so I hope that even if my experiment isn’t successful, I’ll have at least one visitor from Montana.

That’s it for now. Hope you find this interesting enough to send to people you know, and hope that l start getting interesting data in a day or two.