On Friday, July 17 2009 this blog was was officially relaunched. It has been 5 days and we have had 126 unique visitors as tracked with W3Counter and Site Analytics that came with the hosting account. It has been quite the humbling experience. WOW.
Monthly we will post the our statistics and compare them to what other stats counters are seeing. Tonight is a milestone as we definitely have passed over 100 readers. Therefore, you, the reader, get to learn more about your whatwillweuse.com neighbors…
First browsers., chances are you use Firefox but there is a smattering of Safari.
1 Firefox 3.0 42%
2 Safari 4.0 14%
3 Mozilla 1.9 14%
4 Firefox 3.5 11%
everything else each category is 2% or less including IE of any type and Chrome.
Then operating systems…
1 Linux 64%
2 Mac OS X 18%
3 Windows XP 7%
4 Unknown 6%
everything else each category is 2% or less including Vista, Windows 7, iPhone, and PalmOS.
You could say to me, “Gee, Beth Lynn, your audience is not representative of the population” but I assert the following…
Until now, these type of “market share” studies have been done by marketing professionals who have a product to market. Their results would then be tainted toward the type of products they offer. In order to reach everyone, and not just the people who buy stuff on the internet, personal websites must become part of the operating system and browser tracking in order for the world to see an accurate count. This blog, with the help of W3Counter, is a game changer because we at “What will we use” will use the power of social capital to get the general population involved in the counting of browser and operating system statistics based on page hits. That means you can help us out by adding a counter to your website or WordPress blog for free here with w3counter. W3Counter’s global stats will upload monthly with the data that we collect here at www.whatwillweuse.com and the data you see resulting in traffic from your network. Amazingly, w3counter does not cost you anything for the basic account and you will get to see information on where your visitors are and what they are using. Please signup for your account, copy the javascript into your index.html and we will make history together. Oh yeah, there is a wordpress plug into too. W3counter is real simple for real folks.
I’ve been so pleased that I just signed up for the pro account. If you like w3counter, support them because they get community like no other web statistics company.
This has been an unpaid product endorsement.
This content is published under the Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
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Could you detail how w3counter global stats results (and results from other identified sources) will be used to track the areas of concentration identified in post 1?
Also, will your complete results be used to identify issues in adoption of open source software? If so, how?
Firefox is good.And your website is very nice.
WOW, the *entire* Wu Tang Clan wants to know my methods.
I’ve updated post #1 comments. When I made post #1 I browsed wikipedia for items C-F. When I do the monthly report early August, I will site my sources for each item. As this process gets better, my methods will get better. Are you offering help? Ultimately, we need to partner with a University or corporate researcher to come up with good numbers on point C.
We have 23 months to work this out. Stay tuned.
Tracking real data for browsers and OSes is nice, but I still think most of the blogs of the readers of this blog are visited by geeks. I’d try to get stats from a much more “neutral” website, and the best I can think of is Facebook.
I’ve just tried something with w3counter that you might want to encourage (before someone makes a Facebook extension for that). If you have a Facebook account, you might try that :
* Create a new conf on w3counter and assign it to your Facebook profile URL ;
* Add the MyHTML application to your profile (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=5577282239&ref=search) and create a box with the w3counter code ;
* Go to the Application settings and add the box to your profile ;
* Go to your profile, go to the boxes tab, and move the created box to your wall tab.
Watch the stats as they come
Better yet actually might be to make a Facebook application that posts the w3counter code in such a way that all your contacts get to see it in their overview. That would generate fast and efficient stats imo.
Please do add a w3counter to all social networking sites like facebook. As many real people we can get using w3counter, the more realistic world numbers we will see. We especially need web points of presence that are tracking in non-English languages.
I assert that the geeks have been underrepresented in visitors of sites that have a product site. Also, I am sure that people who do not buy from these American-centric companies because they live elsewhere or have other needs are also untracked.
By encouraging my friends to jump into to a poll which has been staged by networking professionals for decades, we can actually fight back by playing their game.
Do you use the word “staged” to mean biased, as in, w3Counter’s global stats results are contrived?
What do you think about potential bias in your data and your readers’ data?
Do you think w3Counter may see your promotion as an attempt to introduce bias? Is it possible that they may remove your results without you knowing?
Can’t find any information on who contributes to w3Counter’s data. Not sure if your additions will actually improve accuracy of the results. I’m no statistician though, so no idea how significant precision is.
Bug #1 refers to market share in terms of PCs being sold at the moment. w3Counter and similar services show market share in terms of computers being used online at the moment. This is an important difference because at the current rate that PCs are being replaced, Microsoft would probably still have the majority of market share in 24 months according to w3Counter even if it stopped selling licenses tomorrow. This would make the 24 month time frame nearly impossible. PC sales would have to rise dramatically, or people would have to reinstall operating systems (and deal with all the problems that are associated with non-preinstallations). Solving Bug #1 in terms of sales in 23 months is certainly optimistic, but it is at least more feasible.
I disagree. Most machines that most run Windows 98, XP, or 2000 right now will likely be recycled into Linux systems or will sit in landfills by June 30, 2011.
Hello,
Thanks for article. Everytime like to read you.
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