Let's get one thing straight right off the bat.  I'm not old yet.  So, when I reminisce about the days of dial up BBSs and confess to being a bit blown away by the ways the Internet has changed the world I'm not pining for simpler times.  The bad old days of disconnected computing have been relegated to the dustbin of history where they should remain.

By the time I got to high school, the infant Internet was just starting to find its way into homes and schools.  In the mid-1990s at ASMS, the Alabama School of Math and Science, we were toying around with building web sites and using Mosaic to browse the web.  This seemed like a natural evolution of the BBS systems that had already become commonplace, just on a much grander scale.  But, the Internet hadn't really caught fire yet.  It was mostly academic, with a few technology companies beginning to stake their claim.  By the time I graduated, however, the Internet had exploded.  Hundreds of millions of people poured online as new businesses and ideas were conceived, built, bought and self-destructed on a daily basis.

It is in this context that I run my blog.  This site, this little, insignificant corner of the Internet is mine.  I post a few times a month about very niche topics in computing.  Even so, one guy with one tiny site can reach a global audience.  Nothing makes this more visible to me than the world map view provided by Google Analytics.

The map is pretty self explanatory.  The color of each country indicates how many people have visited from that locale.  The darker the country, the more visitors they send my way.  When I look at this map (which shows visitors from the last couple months) a few things strike me immediately.  The first is how many countries have sent readers to my site.  The fact that somebody publishing a niche blog on a cheap web host can have a global reach truly speaks to how the Internet has democratized publishing.  You don't need a publisher, press and distribution network to get your ideas out there.  All you need is a simple site and something to say.

The second thing that strikes me is where the bulk of my visitors come from.  I am based in the US and write in English, but only about 25% of my visitors are in the United States.  The country that is number two on the list should be no surprise given the topics I blog about:  India.  India sends a huge number of readers and commenters which speaks to the size of their IT industry.  So, a big hello (नमस्ते) to all my Indian friends!  As expected, various countries in Western Europe usually fill out the rest of my top 10 visitors by country.

The last thing that stands out is the places that don't / can't visit.  Look at the giant swathes of Africa that have sent zero visitors.  It doesn't matter if I map the last month or the last two years of site visits, that section of the world remains off the list.  The same is true of much of the Middle East and the former Soviet republics.  Why don't they show up in the list?  Is it a lack of interest in computing topics?  A lack of infrastructure to get online?  Or is it something else?  Tragically, it is these parts of the world that have the biggest need for the economic transformations that can come from the Internet, as well as the political changes that can only start when people have open access to information and a platform for free communication.    

When I was 8 or 9 one of my aunts and her husband moved to Japan to teach English.  Within a few months they had set me up with a pen pal.  I can still remember dropping a letter in the mail knowing that it would be weeks, if not months before I could expect a reply from one of the few people I knew who lived in a foreign land.  Asynchronous communication at its slowest.  This was my first experience building a relationship with somebody I never met face to face and it was painfully slow.

Maybe that is why I find it so amazing that it has become so trivial to engage with a global community.