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It seems there are a lot of Norwegians coming to town or there are lots of public transit enthusiasts. It seems Norway ranks first in total hits from foreign countries for the CTA's website, having registered 15,395 hits on the CTA's bus tracker website from the country over the last year. But why? Tourism plans, sure. Maybe they're researching the home city of President-Elect Barack Obama, who's considered a "celebrity" in Eruope. Or, perhaps, they're trying to steal our secrets. Whatever the case, it seems the visits are intentional.
But it doesn't appear that most of those 15,000-plus Norwegian folks happened along to the Bus Tracker site by accident because 75 percent of them clicked through to visit other pages on the CTA Web site and spent more than 18 minutes there before moving on, officials said. "Many people just like to watch buses on their computer, even if they are not planning a trip," CTA spokeswoman Noelle Gaffney said.Enthusiasts just watching mass transit systems? Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Filipinos spent the longest average time on the site at 32 minutes, which is usually how long we have to wait for the North Ave. bus. ZING!
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Interestingly, there was a comment on the Trib's article that appears to have disappeared, but it speculated that the hits are coming from people using Opera Mini web browsers, which have or had proxy servers located in Norway.
So, it all comes together now. Haven't you people seen the weather lately? Norway must have some kind of weather machine to spread Norwegian climate patterns around the world, and now they're doing internet research of their future conquests. Say hello to your new Norwegian overlords.
How did that comment dissapear? The opera mini proxy servers (the ones on the bb) are in norway. The whole article is total bullshit.
oh yea i definitely saw that comment.
I don't read Norwegian, but the pictures of computers and the scatterings of "Opera Mini" in this article seem to give credence to that explanation.
Sounds to me like Oslo State and Manila A&M students had a class assignment on how to make mistakes while running a public transit system.
I was the one who posted that comment - I think it was in Hilkevich's blog but they moved it to the articles.
If you go to the Opera Mini page at Wikipedia it explains how the proxy servers work. Opera recently opened a server farm in the US so CTA shouldn't see so many hits from Norway.
You just hope they don't decide that this means they should open up a travel office in Norway because of all the interest. If someone at the CTA could read a referrer log they wouldn't have put this out.
(typed in Opera Mini on a phone)
Many webcrawlers (the bots that actively scour the internet to do updates on super-servers for google, yahoo, etc.) run through proxy servers or from servers hosted elsewhere.
While it is possible that a site like google is keeping servers in Norway or such a place, it is more likely that, like Alfonso said above, that the webcrawlers are running through proxies listed as being from Norway.
I have no idea how many root pages that a site like CTA's has, but it is possible that it has several hundred and there might be several "Norwegian" webcrawlers cataloging their new site's pages, thus tons of hits.
I'm still trying to figure out where "Eruope" might be.