KMi's Jiri Komzak has extended the nifty little blog-gutter-tool that you now see along the upper left side of Get Real, which shows you the locations of everyone who has visited this page (after a once-nightly update, that is). You don't even have to click on the map: just visiting this page is sufficient... though of course you should click anyway just to see what it does! It uses IP -> latitude/longitude conversion, which although never 100% right is generally 'good enough', and allows you to zoom in just a little at the continent level. It also deploys Jiri's own clustering algorithms to keep the maps pretty compact and speedily displayed.

Best of all, anyone can now embed this tool in any page.... Jiri has just updated the KMi HitMaps page with a little 'Generate HTML' box so you can easily stick this type of map in your blog gutter (or anywhere else for that matter). The page also now includes a growing list of which sites are using HitMaps. Enjoy!