Status Update

Basically, there is not much to update about. It all depends now on new people who may visit, and promote this site, so until it happens, there won’t be many new visitors. I’m still seeing a new visit here and there, but no new countries.

Day 10 Results

Today I won’t share a photo with you, as only 3 new visits were made. I hope I find a way to start the experiment again.

Day 9 Results

Here are the results for day 9:

No new countries added today.

Day 8 Results

Here are the results for today:

Not a lot of visits today, but France was added to the list.

About the Experiment – New Version

It seems my initial explanation of this experiment wasn’t good enough (perhaps not even to myself), so I will try to explain differently.

My experiment is about social networking.

Each one of us has a social network that consists of friends, family, etc. Each member of our social network has his own social network, and so on, and so on.

In this experiment, I wanted to see how my social network can connect me to people around the world. Let’s say that I live in France. My social network consists of people in France, and also some people in the UK. However, one of my friends has a friend in the US, and that friend has a friend in China, so theoretically, my social network can connect me to that person in China.

So basically, if I send a link to this site to my social network, and they send it to their social networks, I can theoretically reach most of the world, and that was my original goal.

However, I have found out that the limit here is of how people perceive the experiment, and if they don’t understand it, they won’t want to participate, and that’s what happened along the line. My social network did visit the site, and I got visits from their social network, but only up to a certain point, and now it has slowed down.

This is why I decided to expand the experiment. I will try to grab the interest of a blog, or web site, and try to get help from them, by publishing my experiment. You may claim that it will not test social networks, but rather how popular that web site is, but there is a way to work around it. I can have them ask people to send the direct link to the experiment site to their social networks. The analytics service that I use (Google Analytics) can show me how many people have arrived from the referring web site, and how many arrived by social networking. That could certainly work. Now I need to find volunteers.

Day 7 Results

Here are the results for Day 7:

A slow day, with one big country addition, as you can see, and that is Russia. Other than that, not much new. Still waiting for a breakthrough, but it looks like people don’t understand the experiment.

Day 6 Results

Finally, some improvement:

Visitors from four “new” countries have viewed the site: Finland, Germany, Colombia, and Brazil. It appears my experiment is circulating in South America, as well as in Scandinavia.

An interesting thing to note is that half of the countries have only 1 visit. I assume it means that while the first circle of people have sent a link of this site to their friends, the second circle is not that enthusiastic to forward a link to their friends, and a third circle, if exists, is probably even less enthusiastic. There are only two countries which have a significant number of visitors.

Regarding the US, still no Montana, but here is the current map:

Another interesting thing is a look at the unique visitors number throughout these six days (click to get a better view):

I’ve started the experiment on the night of the 26th (day 0). The majority of visitors came the first day, and that number declined over the next days. However, today saw an increase in numbers, and was shy just 6 visitors from the second day. Let’s see what tomorrow brings in.

Day 5 Results

With only 8 visits today, here is how the map looks like:

I’ll give it another day or two before I try something new.

Day 4 Results

Things are improving in the number of countries, as you can see below:

Although there were fewer visitors, the number of countries has doubled. The new countries include: Australia, Spain, UK, Sweden, Uruguay, and Chile.

It’s still hard to know what to expect of this current phase of the experiment. Right now, I’ve only taken two actions of advertising this. One was an email to around 20 people I know, and the other was posting to an internet forum I participate in. While the number of visitors is declining, even one person can help me spread the word to several countries. So even if the number of visits is low today, it doesn’t mean that it won’t increase tomorrow.

Day 3 Results

Things are definitely slowing down:

No new countries were added today. In addition, I had only 9 unique visitors today. I assume that I’ve almost reached the end of the line with my current contacts, although I know that there will probably be a few more visits based on the action that I took so far. I’m still thinking of different ways I can use to revive the interest in this experiment. Don’t worry, I’ll let you know once I try something new. In any case, I haven’t given up yet, so don’t you give up either! Spread the word on this Small Web Experiment.

And a word for the people just joining the experiment, the purpose of the experiment is to get visits from a lot of countries, so that the map you see above will mostly be green. It’s not about the amount of people, but rather the amount of countries. You may not know people from other countries, but your friends might. So this stage of the experiment is to see if by using my social network, I can achieve this goal. I know I have reached people who don’t know me, so that gives me some hope.

Day 2 Results

After two days, here is how it looks like:

Basically, things are going pretty slowly. One country, Ukraine, was added to the list. Today there were 27 visits (22 unique visitors) from 3 countries. If I thought the results would look like a pyramid, they actually look like an upside-down pyramid, as yesterday there were far more visitors. Still, only a couple of days have passed, so anything can still happen. Nevertheless, I’m starting to think of a backup plan, in case the visitors dwindle in numbers.

And a word to the new visitors. Take your time, read the Welcome post, and if you like the idea, tell your friends to visit the site!

Day 1 Results

Drum roll please… Here are the graphic results of today:

It looks impressive that North America has visited the site, but looks can be deceiving. Most of the visits are from a small middle-eastern country (that’s not a dead pixel in your LCD screen). There are 6 visits from the US (4 states), and one visit from each of the following: Canada, Turkey, and the Netherlands.

So, it doesn’t look great so far, but that’s just Day 1 of this Small Web Experiment.

Some thoughts before the results of Day 1

I started this experiment by emailing around 20 people I know, asking them to check out this site, and forward the link to their friends. My intention was that at least some of these people would comply with my humble request, thus sending the link to other people, who will visit the site, and these new visitors will send the link forward, and so on, and so on, until the experiment would be successful – people from all around the world will visit the site. I don’t know how well it went yet, but I can only guess from the feedback that I received so far. I got one positive reaction, but also a few questions from people who didn’t understand what this was about. As a result, I’ve changed the text in my first post a bit, in hopes that it would help.

I took another action, by posting my experiment story, and link, in an internet forum that I regularly participate in. The first reaction was one of suspicion, asking other people to check the experiment site for any malware!

So, from this I gather that people may not understand my intentions, or even fear accessing the web site. That is not good for the experiment…

Another issue is that I’m running out of sources. I won’t send the link again to the same contacts. If people misunderstand this, or don’t want to take a part in this, they are a source which cannot help the experiment anymore.

So, what happened today? I will post the full results later, but I had 46 visits from 35 unique visitors. Most of them from one country, so, it’s not very encouraging so far. However, my hope is that some of these people will help me spread the word.

Stay tuned…

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.