What an interesting audience you are!
// September 24th, 2009 // My work
I’m usually not short of ways to divert myself from the writing I don’t want to do, but this morning I found myself reading my FeedBurner stats to infer a little about the people who read Doing Words in RSS format or have it delivered by email. Now, it goes without saying that I lurv each of you madly and would happily bear your children were I blessed with a womb and functioning nipples, but I don’t indulge in a lot of navel gazing generally (at my age it’s all fluff in there) and specifically, I’m just glad to have a reader at all, much less count both of you.
But today? Well, either I really don’t want to do my work, or you’re much more interesting than I expected you to be… or both.
First up: RSS and email are still important audiences but I expect they are losing ground to a larger audience reading this (and other blogs) in a web page in a browser, after following a link from Twitter. Today, I’m omitting that audience (but if you leave me a witty comment below I promise to focus on you another time).
I won’t disclose a total number of RSS and email readers because I learned from years of anguished sideways glances from Tony Faure during meetings to never disclose a number unless you have to. But you and I already know you are either a member of a very exclusive digital super-elite, or a vanishing small number of people avoiding doing their work. Or both. And one of you is my Dad (love you Dad!)
Most surprising thing I learned: more than 75% of you read this using FriendFeed. I would have had my money on Google Reader, Netvibes and NewsGator. Almost anything can be inferred from a statistic, but for the purposes of work avoidance, let’s interpret this to mean you’re more into social media than the average web user. FriendFeed is very cool but not yet mainstream; so must you be.
Next most surprising things: none of you RSS readers use Safari and most of you use Firefox. I would have guessed about an even 1:1:1 ratio between Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari and it turns out to be a 1:2:0 ratio. Again, this could mean almost anything, but I choose to infer that you’re an online professional, and if you’re a Mac user, you’re using Firefox for professional, plug-in and CSS-related reasons. You probably have cool stickers on the lid of your laptop.
Ha! See? Penetrating insights.
Is that the time? You should get back to work, and so should I.
In my mind, you look like these two (photo by Robert Scales)
