How many countries have featured on the blog?

This week I posted a story from Lithuania, and I noted to myself that this is only the country’s second appearance on the blog. (It got a shout out for having the world’s best public wi-fi last year.) That made me wonder: how many countries have featured on the blog so far? And can I collect them all, by finding a story for every country that hasn’t made an appearance yet?

So in between other things, I’ve made a list of 200 countries and territories, and gone through and tagged where they appear on the blog. 170 of the 200 have been mentioned, many of them with specific stories from that place. Just 30 to go to complete the whole set, though ideally I’d like to have a positive story from each place. Some locations only appear for negative reasons. Mauritania, for example, turns up just the once as the country in the world with the most slaves.

Being based in Britain, there are more UK stories than anywhere else, with English speaking countries over-represented. But one of my touchstones for the blog is that good ideas can come from anywhere. What better way to demonstrate that than to find a positive story from every country in the world?

Besides, the blog has an international readership already. A diversity of content would better serve a diversity of readers. In case you’re wondering, the biggest slice of readers come from the USA, then the UK and Canada. The rest of the top ten is less predictable, and runs through India, Australia, Philippines, South Africa, Kenya, Germany and Norway. At the other end of the list, I’ve only had four visitors from North Korea since WordPress has been counting. Just one from Kosovo, and one from Antarctica. The only places with no traffic at all from them are Western Sahara and the Norwegian territory of Svalbard.

If you want to help me with this little challenge, feel free to send me any links and stories from unexpected places that you come across.