Hello…I’ve got to update the global a go-go page at the end of the month. Then I promise (remind me) to update the stats once a month. Its always been good fun to see just how much global interest there is in The Clash. Its something I’ve always assumed to be true but the blog has demonstrated to me that the band made a difference in countries all around the planet . I was thinking about how so much of the planet do not speak English as their first language (about 92%) and while a lot of people do have English as a second language its still remarkable how rock music just crosses borders. For example I’ve only got (shamefully) a handful of albums that aren’t sung in English and yet speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, German, French, Russian, Hindi and Japanese all enjoy The Clash.  Even though there a lots of fairly decent website translators out there I’m sure a lot of readers also navigate through my sloppy English complete with my slang and swearing to read the blog. I really appreciate each one of those visits to the site. I really like numbers, and this might be a bit trainspotting for you so I apologise at the outset.

The Clash still cast a long shadow to music fans in each continent with fans in dozens of countries where the band never even played live. Not too mention so many of us who were too young too have seen The Clash or indeed some who weren’t born. I just get such a buzz knowing the band continue to matter in small towns and big cities the world over. Anyway, I’m going to share more of that with you as during the early days of the blog we had a lot of fun with people sending in hellos from Israel and Bosnia, Singapore and Chile – we need to have fun with that. I’ve now got 13 months of data, nearly 170,000 visits from over 70,000 different individuals (some never return sadly). Initially I’ll get the Global page more current and before that celebrate the countries that have provided the most visits – to date as you might expect the UK and USA being the top two headed up by:

The United States: What can I say – you’ve got a lot more people than Britain in the first place I think about five times more – but your continued support of the band and the blog is excellent. So far over 60,000 visits from the States which represents 35.54% of all visits. Presently pat yourself on the back but gently you are only about 6,000 visits ahead of the UK! You’re not quite as patient as the world, on average spending about 11 seconds less reading the blog than everyone combined. We were offline in May if you’re wondering about the lack of data for that month, I had to see a man about a dog.

That race with the UK is interesting though since we began it was always close with the US taking a bigger lead until recent months when the gap has closed. These two countries combined initially made up as much as 70% of all visits. Check out the stats on the left though…the ‘rest of the world’ is catching up in number, as the blog has grown so has the impact in countries outside the ‘big two’ which is exciting news. I never really expected that but word of mouth has seen the blog now get close to 40% of visits from other nations. We’ll take at look at some of the other nations in future posts but lets see what the USA brings to the blog. As you can see below the darker your state the more visits you send to the site.

The top 5 might not shock you, numbers 6 -10 perhaps more so: Top States visiting the blog -(states 1-6 account for half of all visits)

1-5 California, New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, Connecticut (!)

6-10 New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois, Arizona, Massachusetts

States that do better than their population suggests: Missouri (12) Maryland (15)

States that don’t care enough about The Clash: Iowa (3o) Oklahoma (40) Mississippi (44) Arkansas (46)

We’ve had visits from every single state from California with over 13,000 down to Wyoming and Alaska with 13 and 7 respectively.

Who lingers longest on the site? Stand forward Minnesota, Hawaii and South Carolina. In Minnesota the average visit is over 10 minutes, four times longer than the average. You really are the nicest people in the land.

Who has better things to do? Oklahoma, Montana and Wyoming. Is this due to dial up??

New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago are the biggest Clash cities it would appear. I must make mention of these other towns that have provided many hundreds of visits: Fresno, Bend, Seattle, Phoenix, Denver, San Antonio, Houston, Jefferson City, Detroit, Atlanta, Stroudsburg (?), Brookville (?), Hartford and Boston.

Hope you found that a third as much fun as I did. Thanks for all your visits – it would make the Clash proud I’m sure. Next time we’ll focus on the UK traffic (next time I do that this is…) and then other countries of course. Cheers – Tim