 Have you ever stopped to think about the International composition of the Internet? You can be on an American website one minute and be on a German or African website the next, without even knowing that the servers that hold these two websites are thousands of miles apart.
Ixquick one of the search engines that I use comes out of the Netherlands. Opera, one of the Web browsers that I like comes from Norway. Remember the Milk, an online to do list that I use, hails from Australia.
Once the word gets out about a good website, it can quickly become an International hit. In the past year, my own Compu-KISS website has had visitors from 196 different countries and territories. The top ten may not surprise you. They were:
1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Australia
5. India
6. Philippines
7. South Africa
8. Iceland
9. Malaysia
10. Germany
What may surprise you is that we also had visitors from the Congo, Liechtenstein, Polynesia, Azerbaijan, Cuba, Quatar, Tanzania, Maldives, Fiji, Cyprus, Iraq, and Tonga. While I know where these countries are located, there were also visitors from a few countries that I had to look up on the map. You are better at geography than I if you know where Gabon, Benin, Suriname, Lesotho, Eritrea, and Kyrgyzstan are located.
Yet, people from all of these countries and many more visited the Compu-KISS website. Message boards and chat rooms on the Internet also have an International flavor. While visitors to the Compu-KISS message boards may wish you a Happy 4th of July, there are also folks who visit our message boards who will wish you a Happy Dragon Boat Festival or Happy Bastille Day.
Sometimes when I send out my newsletters and people are out of the office or on vacation, I get automated email responses. While the majority of these are in English, I have also received responses in Spanish, German, Swedish, Polish, Greek, and a few other languages that I couldn't identify.
Over the years, it has also become more and more common for people from other countries contact me for more information. In the past month, I received several such emails. A teacher in Hong Kong emailed requesting permission to use one of the tutorials from the Compu-KISS website to help teach English to his students. A lady from Mumbai wrote requesting more information on a product that I reviewed. A man from Australia wrote to tell me how much he liked one of my books.
This International flavor of the Internet is truly bringing people together. You might expect that the Pilot, being a local newspaper, would only generate local interest in their website. Yet the Pilot's site at www.thepilot.com, also garners visitors from around the world.
When you think about it. It is truly amazing. We can read local papers from other countries and those in other countries can read our local paper. While we may never see Mumbai or Fiji, our lives and the lives of those who live places around the world are somehow intertwined by the Internet. And, when you stop to think about it -- that is truly amazing.
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