Unfortunately, the vast majority of applications that do this today make some very questionable and often inaccurate assumptions about site visitors, their location, and even their existence. Needless to say, these users are in fact not located in Virginia, although the report indicates otherwise. In a perfect world, it would be possible to directly correlate IPs with actual user location. This is however not a perfect world, and with the increasing consolidation in the ISP market, fewer and fewer people's IP addresses have anything to do with the actual location of the ISP through which they're accessing the Internet. I'm not sure it's actually possible at all to identify a user's true geographic location.
Most information generated by today's Web log server analysis tools is in fact rather suspect.
Ditto on amount of user traffic from a specific region, by the way, which is also based on a number of questionable assumptions about how user sessions and users are identified and counted. If you have any comments or suggestions on this site, please feel free to send an email to E-Commerce Guide's Managing Editor . Corp. All Rights Reserved. Legal Notices, Reprints.