Thursday, December 06, 2007

ClustrMaps removed from blogs everywhere

I think ClustrMaps is one of the oldest widgets around and is the last widget to be removed from my blog (along with Flickr). As Skelliewag puts it in 50 Tips to Unclutter Your Blog:
21. Remove widgets showing which countries your visitors are coming from. The internet is quite old now. It’s no longer amazing to us that people can visit a blog from overseas.
Sniff! Sad but true. I'll visit you in this post. Thanks for all the overseas visits!

5 comments :

Anonymous said...

How is BlogRush working out for you? I removed that recently from my blog.

Curious, why remove flickr? I love seeing flickr widgets on blogs and look at other's pictures.

~Tracie
http://spacytracie.com

Anonymous said...

Hi... I'm sorry you're leaving us (ClustrMaps), but every day we get emails thanking us for the great and scalable and small-footprint service we provide!

So although it is true that 'the Interent is everywhere', not everyone knows where all their readers are from, and using us gives them a quick insight, and often an emotional boost as well!

Finally, although we can appreciate that you may personally feel a "so what?" sense, I need to ask you three things:

1. How many other widget providers will beam in to your blog the way I am doing now to double-check if you're a happy user?

2. The fine-grained information we provide with ClustrMaps+ may well surprise you even now - and I'm happy to give you a free upgrade to try it out.

3. Regardless of everything else, I'm wondering if I could prevail upon you to moderate your rather alarming-sounding headline, i.e. 'banished' sounds like something much stronger than a personal choice to remove!!!

Many thanks for listening..

-CJ on behalf of the ClustrMaps Team

Anonymous said...

p.s. I have just upgraded you to ClustrMaps+, and the new zoomed-in continent maps should kick in within a few days.

Finally, re-reading your headline, it's even more worrying than I thought: 'banished from blogs everywhere' is demonstrably untrue... moreover it is very different from what you actually mean, which is 'removed voluntarily from some blogs'!! Have a look at our great testimonials here:

http://del.icio.us/clustrmaps

Many thanks for your consideration.

-CJ on behalf of the ClustrMaps Team

Angela said...

You're right, I'm impressed. In fact, I did get a quick ping back when I removed Feedjit from my blog, so I restored them immediately. They even put in a feature request that I ask for a few days later.

I will restore you guys shortly and put up a post too. Thanks for your terrific customer service. Sorry about the "banished" word, I've been running a high fever all week.

Anonymous said...

Hi again… many thanks for the quick adjustment… very much appreciated!

Er, now if I can be a total pain: that word “everywhere”… we monitor our statistics very carefully, and “removed everywhere” is simply not the case! We’re very well established, growing nicely, delivering over 8,000,000 thumbnail maps DAILY, and at an increasing rate, so the statistics just don’t mesh with your headline. The story that inspired the ‘cleanup’ is very different… it has worthy recommendations for getting rid of clutter. But your story extrapolates from that with a headline that we think is unfair and damaging.

Normally we wouldn’t dream of interfering in someone’s blog or their personal style of writing: that’s what blogging is about! But this one is different, because crowds tend to move in fashionable ways, and anyone who thinks our widget is disappearing may ‘join the herd’, and you will have created a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy.

We humbly urge you to reconsider the wording of the headline… many thanks for your consideration…

CJ on behalf of the Clustrmaps Team