As I look at these products I am truly amazed and I think about the mind of the creator..interesting right..and so different from the way that I think or maybe not. Well when you want to know something you just ask right? And I did..and with that said…pay attention to the mind of this greatness! Because to me..its very different than what I expected.
The CEO and creator of Clustrmaps..Marc Eisenstadt <<<Click the link<<< He is really amazing!<<<
1. Will you share a little about yourself? “I’m a lifelong-academic-turned-entreprenuer, now giving away and promoting widgets instead of publishing thoughts about (and studies of) the future of knowledge, learning and user interfaces – go figure! I keep a summary of highlights on my LinkedIn profile!“
2. How did you and your crew come up with the idea of clustrmaps? “I have long been interested in graphical visualizations, as typified by Edward Tufte’s great book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin’s wonderful Atlas of Cyberspace. Much of my academic work in the past involved developing tools to help novice computer users visualize what was happening inside their computer programs. In the mid-90′s my research work moved into the direction of social software and ‘presence’, looking at ways to create a better ‘community spirit’ and a feeling of ‘being there’ during on line interactions with large groups – not by deploying Virtual Reality but rather through custom visualizations of symbols to depict moods, gestures and locations. We developed an idea called BuddySpace which essentially married location visualization with instant messaging, and grew a respectable user community in the academic world. That work emphasized real-time presence (‘Who is on-line NOW?’), but it later occurred to me that ‘offline presence’ (‘Who WAS there?’) was just as interesting. It became apparent that SEEING the locations of your own website visitors in a graphical and intuitive way could be very informative and motivating, in fact even better than seeing the standard statistics provided by the big-name web analytics tools! ClustrMaps was developed as a way of showing off to your public readership ‘impossibly many dots in an impossibly small space, all impossibly fast’, because people enjoyed the motivation of quickly seeing visitor locations, yet without it being too intrusive.”
3. I dream of having to pay for the pro version one day..believe it or not its a goal…who uses the pro version? Share a few of the big dogs, please???? “I assume you are talking about the “ClustrMaps+” version, which provides better zoomed-in maps and no ads for a small subscription fee (less than $1 a month if you take the 2-year option). Sure… there are a very large number of these. One of our biggest users in that category is www.educar.org, a Latin American e-learning and virtual education portal. They actually run a family of sites that all use ClustrMaps+. Another big user is Jesse Ferrell of Accuweather.com, who runs a great blog and weather analysis site. Jesse uses ClustrMaps+, and archives the maps afresh every single DAY so it is easy to keep track of the changing pattern of daily visitors. Another big user is www.hitsusa.com, a webmaster-oriented website traffic tips site, and then there’s www.1800pocketpc.com that specializes in PocketPC freeware and Windows Mobile software. I could go on and on – we get everyone from bloggers to businesses, and a few very large media companies and even international retail outlets that obviously have their own webmasters and server analytics tools, but prefer the simplicity and ‘gestalt view’ that they get from ClustrMaps+. Some of these bigger ones pay for an extra license that entitles them to have a hidden map!”
