Digg chooses Firefox and Windows
Digg is a very popular site where a fairly technical user base collect and rate stories from the work of IT and technology. As such, it’s interesting to find out a little about the Digg users. I’m in the unusual position of being able to analyze in depth the traffic sent by Digg (A recent post sent 20,000 Digg users to my blog, which has a normal daily traffic of just 100-200).
You might be more surprised to know that not only is Firefox the most widely used browser – but that Microsoft’s venerable Internet Explorer is not even close – in fact, it’s in danger of slipping to third place behind Apple’s Safari.
The noisy Linux advocates are either drowning out the masses or else failing to practise what they preach, since they took just 6.5% of the hits. No evidence of the long awaited breakthrough on the desktop there. Microsoft’s Windows remains unchallenged at the top, but Apple’s Mac proves stronger than I expected at 13.8% – which also shows that a sizable portion of Mac users have abandoned Safari in favour of Firefox or Camino.
The largest mass of Digg users comes from the United States, but in total 193 countries and territories are represented (as far as awstat’s geoip plugin can determine anyway). English speaking countries make up a very high percentage of users.
As far as I know no-one has published detailed information like this before. Information on the impact of digg is pretty sparse online although the website Wired.com did run an article on Digg last November, where they stated that 500,000 people read Digg, and Wikipedia says that Digg.com has passed 100,000 registered users. Wired interviewed a blogger who said Digg had driven 7,000 readers to his blog – This is slightly below the 20,000 readers my post had, which could be accounted for by the increase in Digg’s popularity in the last few months, or by a higher than average number of ‘Diggs’ on my story.
I’d be very interested in any comments anyone has on this. I’d love to see the day when open source operating systems were ready for desktop use, especially for knowledgable users. Nerds drive a lot of the market, as can be seen by overall firefox adoption, and until they think an open source operating system is ready for the desktop, corperate users and the general public won’t hear about it.
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Posted by akaDruid on 21 Feb 2006 at 12:02 pm
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