2.000.000 Hits

On June 3, almost 9 months after the first post on September 10 last year, the hit counter on strangemaps went up to 1 million. Today, a bit over a month after the first million, the counter hit 2 million. At this rate of acceleration, strangemaps will hit its third million within a week. And will be up to a gazillion come September 10 this year.

Well, maybe not.

The map comparing US states to countries with similar GDPs (#131) was a gigantic crowd-puller, garnering a little over 160.000 hits in just one day, June 12. The speed with which the second million swung around is in large part due to the attention that map generated. To see a few thought-provoking spin-offs of the map and read some interesting background on its origin, please go to the follow-up post (#135).

I don’t know whether a similar big hit will come around. In any case, I’m not looking for one. I’ll keep doing what I did – look for ‘strange maps’: maps that are ‘different’, tell a story, probably aren’t in any atlas and are nice to look at to boot. The search for those maps has become easier by the hundreds of suggestions that have flooded in via the strangemaps e-mail address (in the sidebar). I’m thankful for all those mails, but please understand I won’t be able to post each and every suggested map.

This might also be a good moment to answer the most frequently asked question: Is there an RSS feed for this blog? Even though I don’t quite know what an RSS feed is, I can tell you that yes, there is one: strangemaps.wordpress.com/feed should do it. And maybe one day soon I’ll figure out how to put that address in the sidebar.

I’m also in the process of categorising the 140-odd map entries so far, which should make for some interesting sub-collections… Please browse the categories and let me know what you think.

That’s it. Thanks for watching!