> I wouldn't be suprized to see
> combined maps come out at 3rd party stats sites too.

Unless they have changed the XML files around on me again, we get no such information supplied to us. All we get is country. I think the idea is to not give out any information to the public at large that could narrow your location down to a specific area. I believe the zip code in the account registration is just for the project to know where people are connecting from. And it is optional at that... The CPDN map is anonymous since a dot isn't bound to a specific user.
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A member of The Knights Who Say Ni!
Yet another stats page: <a href="http://boinc-kwsn.no-ip.info">http://boinc-kwsn.no-ip.info</a>

&gt; well the $50 for 125K lookups has lasted about a year, and even longer since I
&gt; just look up different first 24-bits of an IP address (i.e. 163.1.242.1 and
&gt; 163.1.242.255 are just 163.1.242.1 to me) and store to a database table for
&gt; future use.
&gt;
&gt; I always figured this was more "official" than just hoping people put in their
&gt; actual country &amp; zip code. Plus zip codes vary by country and you'd have
&gt; to do a different query or dataset for each country? I haven't seen a "whole
&gt; earth postal code" lookup (but then again I just ran across the maxmind
&gt; IP/lat/long stuff before the original launch last year).

That's a good point, but a project with say hundreds of thousands of users would burn up 125K fairly quickly I would think. Even if only looking up new unique IPs. But then again, a large project like that may have enough funding that it wouldn't matter.

But I think it's a great idea, and I would like to see it move to other projects as well. :)

<a href="http://www.boinc.dk/index.php?page=user_statistics&amp;project=cpdn&amp;userid=355"><img border="0" height="80" src="http://355.cpdn.sig.boinc.dk?188"></a>

well it's $300-$400 for the entire city/lat/long database, although I think you pay for periodic updates. but it's been pretty fun, I mean it's fun to point at our user map and say "this is the world's largest climate modelling supercomputer!" ;-)

I wonder what the original SETI, with 5 million users would look like, probably just saturated black dots!

I think Carl's right about the impracticality of using postal codes. Only 117 countries have them, and it seems unlikely that all have a utility that enables them to be mapped. It would be a lot of work to produce, and there's no reason to expect it to be free in each case. And although in principle most codes do relate to a small geographic location, you would not achieve that in practice. So you could map from postal codes for North America, but not all of Europe I imagine.