Chris Pendleton, Virtual Earth Evangelist, added a little Non-Virtual Earth map to his blog. What?! A non-VE map, what’s up with that? Well this WorldMap can also display a Virtual Earth map! Thanks to Chris Pendleton:

…What was most interesting is that as I was discovering this whole WorldMaps/ClustrMaps thing this guy from inside Microsoft was talking about WorldMaps on one of the internal aliases. So, I emailed him and said, "DUDE! You’re Microsoft. Why don’t you use Virtual Earth maps?!?" Well, that was a good idea so he did it. And, now WorldMaps is available in both his static map and Virtual Earth map views. Money.

That "he" is Brian Hitney, a Microsoft Developer Evangelist out of North Carolina who runs the Structure Too Big site. The service is free to sign up and all you need to do is drop a little map image (some HTML) on your page and his service will track all of the IPs requesting the image and produce a report for you.

Curious, I decided to add this map to my site too (you will find it at the bottom).

So how to get one? First off you will need to register for this beta-service. Registration is required to protect access to the data. E-mail addresses are never sold, and used only to notify users of service changes. After registration you will be sent an email with a link to activate your account. Once that’s done navigate to the MyWorldMap Account page, there you fill in your website’s url and optional the Longitude and Latitude of where you are. The links you can use to display the map on your page will also be displayed there. Now simply add one of these to your website and you’re done!

This is what the thumbnail one looks like, including WorldMap rank (a ranking against other WorldMap users). You can choose 3 formats or, if you only want to use it for your private tracking needs, choose to place an invisible “tracking pixel” image. You can also link the image to your report page if you wish to do so. I’ve done so on my site, so if you click on my WorldMap there (you can click the image to the left here to go to my site), you will be able to see some more information on where my visitors come from.

Once on the report page you will notice it shows a static map, not a Virtual Earth one. Click on the Virtual Link above the map to switch. In future it will be possible to show the VE one by default.

Lovely Virtual Earth Map! The blue dot shows you where I’m located (no no, not my full home addy, I limited the coordinates to my Hometown :P ). Right below the map are the stats, not much there now since I’ve only added it today… Once I’ve had some visitors green, yellow and red icons will depict traffic levels as Chris explains in his article.

All an all very interesting, and free too! Get your WorldMaps today.