Tryggblog: We’re huge in Brazil

(By Erik)

That’s ”Somos enormes em Brasil” in Portuguese.

If you scroll down the right hand side of this blog you’ll see our Clustrmap, a generalized atlas that shows you where in the world people who are looking at this site are located. (That was a horrific sentence. Good thing I don’t write for a living.)

As a self-styled international reporter, geography buff and — most of all — complete geek, I love looking at our Clustrmap and guessing about the people who are completely wasting their time on Tryggblog.

(Click on the small map and you’ll see a bigger version unless the Clustrmap site is overloaded, which happens on occasion — and incidentally, I almost always misspell “occasion” when I type. Comes out “ocassion.” Once again, good thing that I’m not paid to write, and thank you rolling spell check.)

The total number of hits Tryggblog gets is relatively small. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the primary two are:

1.) Not posting content on a regular basis, giving people a reason to “tune in” daily or weekly, and …
2.) Not posting content that’s of any value whatsoever — unless you’re a fan of the Georgia Bulldogs, Kent Allen and Def Leppard.

The biggest two dots on our map — i.e. the cities that give Tryggblog the most Tryggviews — are Oklahoma City (that’s mostly me checking the site to see if anybody else is looking at it) and Nashville, Tenn. (that’s mostly my parents looking at it because I never call and how else are they supposed to know anything about what’s going on in my life?)

It’s hard to tell the precise locations of the smaller dots, but here are a few other places where people are reading Tryggblog:

Brazil: We have several large-ish dots in this South American country, despite our complete lack of content relating to soccer. The hits largely are the work of Ann White, who kept up with Trygg-related events while she traveled through the area. (Check out Ann’s blog if you want to see a Clustrmap with many more dots than ours.)

Japan: “Domo arigato” to the good people of Tokyo for checking in with Tryggblog. I’ve met several folks from Mito and thereabouts — including folks at Ibaraki Christian University and the Mito Church of Christ. Perhaps Yuki Obata or his father, Shiro, are looking at the site.

Canada: There are some big-ish dots over what I believe are Montreal and Quebec City. I visited those cities (plus Jonquiere, way up north) a couple of months ago and stayed with Mike and Lise Mazzalongo (Verdun, Montreal), Keith Percell (St. Foy, Quebec) and Jean Grenier (Jonquiere). I also logged onto Tryggblog when I was at their homes — hoping it would register hits on the map. (Sad but true.) Jean Grenier was traveling through Oklahoma recently and we went to lunch at Ted’s here in Edmond. His exact words when he tried the habanero salsa — “Ooh la la!” (They treated us like kings, by the way — big shout out to Ted’s.)

Central African Republic: Tryggblog finally registered its first hit in Africa. And it came from an unlikely country — the Central African Republic. I only know one soul in this whole nation — Worlanyo Bor. Brother Bor and his countrymen have endured a lot of hardship in recent years as the CAR recovers from years of political strife.

(This post got a bit unwieldy in the writing, so I’ll return to this subject later. Still a lot of countries to cover.)