Where am I?

I am just back from China and suffering from the usual affects of jet lag – so just a short blog (you’ll be pleased to hear).

I thought I’d pass on lots of Chinese wisdom, but you’ve probably heard them all before. Anyway, as I think they say, the longest blog begins with a single word!

So, I was thinking about my IP address now that I’m back – I was wondering what it was. So I downloaded a widget called what.ip.i.have by Vlad Sasu. I’m a big fan of widgets, which is now a Yahoo product (widgets.yahoo.com). I use widgets for the weather and the rainfall, and I have a BBC newsfeed and one showing my blogs (although it could be set for any other RSS feed). The new widget installed and told me my IP address.

The next stage, I thought, would be to look up that IP address on one of those sites that tell you where in the world each IP address comes from. I live in the beautiful west country near Bath and Bristol in the UK. My broadband connection is a slightly dear, but usually reliable, connection through BT.

So, my next stage was to go to Google and search for sites that would tell me where my IP address came from. I thought it would be an interesting test. In no particular order, I first tried www.ip-adress.com. Like many of the others, it “knew” my IP address already and showed that I was located in Silvertown in Newham, which is east London near the River Thames. I thought that perhaps BT’s cables joined the rest of the world at that point.

Next I tried http://whatismyipaddress.com, and that came up with Silvertown as well. So I thought that definitely must be where I am (Internetwise that is).

http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/iplocation.asp, however, thought I was in Basingstoke, in England. And so did http://www.geobytes.com/IpLocator.htm, which even gave Basingstoke’s longitude and latitude. http://www.ip2location.com/ also had me in Basingstoke.

http://www.analysespider.com/ip2country/lookup.php knew I was in the UK, but had my IP address as coming from Suffolk – which is about as far east of me as you can go without falling into the English Channel.
http://www.blueforge.org/map/ had me miles from anywhere on the Yorkshire Dales – very picturesque, of course, but miles away. And that’s when I stopped.

I just wondered whether other people had tried these IP locators with any degree of success. Ah well, as they said in China, we do live in interesting times!