Stats, just for fun?

Dave, just curious about something. Sometime, when you have a spare minute (ha!), could you tell us the percentage of users who use Linux, Windows and Mac, and what percentages of folks use IE, Firefox, Opera, etc.? Just curious! :)

How could he possibly know? The closest we could come would be through the Voting Booth to get a rough idea.
I have been wrong once before, though (~:

Here are some stats for a website I own, would be interesting to see whether the visitors lists look similar on DG:
Browsers

MS Internet Explorer (Versions) 92.7 %
Netscape (Versions) 5.8 %
Unknown 1.1%
Opera 0.1 %
(too small to measure below)
WebTV browser 0 %
Konqueror 0 %
WebCollage (PDA/Phone browser) 0 %
UP.Browser (PDA/Phone browser) 0 %
Lynx 0 %

*******
Operating Systems

Windows XP 60.2 %
Windows 2000 14.8 %
Windows 98 11.5 %
Windows Me 5.4 %
Mac OS 4.6 %
Unknown 1.3 %
Windows 95 0.9 %
Windows NT 0.7 %
(too small to measure below)
Linux 0 %
WebTV 0 %
AmigaOS 0 %
Unknown Unix system 0 %
Sun Solaris 0 %
LibWWW 0 %

Very interesting! But by what means did you collect these?

The web browser (client) reports its "user agent" to the web server whenever you get a page or post a response. So by running reports on the web server log the webmaster can determine what browser and O/S their users have. For instance, I am using Firefox on Win2000 and my user agent shows as "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040803 Firefox/0.9.3" Of course, the user agent can be faked but not many people do that (except for perhaps a few folks who want to have their non-IE browser impersonate IE for certain sites that do a poor job of "browser sniffing").

Remember a few forums ago, Ulrich and you suggested that we could use multiple email accounts? Well, any website owner can your IP address assigned to your user id so there really isn't much privacy on the net but if you aren't doing anything wrong, it isn't a problem because they can't see who you are unless you break the law. Then they can supoena your provider.

In addition to the type of computer you are using, they can see how many webpages you accessed before theirs and usually exactly which page you went from to them.

To compile this manually would be some job then. Are there automated programs, I wonder.

Ulrich, yes there are.

Web masters have programs to harvest who is coming and when for all sorts of purposes. Mostly 'cause they want to place their advertising well. ; )

Thanks, Darius (~:

You'd be surprised what Dave knows about you... wouldn;t surprise me if he even knows the color of your underwear, too, LOL.

"Mostly 'cause they want to place their advertising well."

Not always true, particularly if a website has no advertising. The tools are of great benefit in assessing the amount of interest in a particular page(s), particular information or groups of images. It allows a webmaster to make decisions on what content is generating interest and what is not. It also can highlight which pages are not generating the kind of traffic one might hope for. It gives the webmaster the opportunity to move things around which should be generating traffic, but aren't because the users aren't finding it due to structure of the site or whatever.

Here is a little quickie test that shows some of what they can see:

http://privacy.net/analyze/

Scroll all the way down when it is over ; )

That's what I thought they "collected" in information. Missed the color of my underwear.

Edited for spelling!

This message was edited Aug 30, 2004 9:43 PM

LOL Darius! They got it wrong, huh?

Daisy, I tried it. A lot of WRONG info, including that I'm using Mozilla/4.0
So, back to the Voting Booth idea.
Darius, 'you sure you're wearing any?

Are you on Firefox by any chance?

Do you know the song "I'm proud to be an Oakie from Muskogee"?
Well, I'm a proud user of MS Internet Explorer5, and lovin' it (~:

Ulrich... Yeah, I was wearing some, LOL.

Max, Darius...That all reminds me of that scene in Superman....When he blushingly tells Lois, "Pink....They're pink."!

On the old server that hosts my site, I could get detailed site statistics for my domain, but the new server doesn't have such robust info readily available. I really miss it. What got me thinking about DG's user statistics was a thread in the Computer Talk forum. More Mac users are surfacing lately, and it made me wonder what all the membership here uses.

Candy - Your stats are very similar to our business' website visitor stats at least in ranking and magnitude if not exact percentages.

"Mostly 'cause they want to place their advertising well."

I agree with Happenstance, that this is not always the case. In one of the web sites I author and manage, the stats help me in various ways. For example, if people are visiting a certain page from all the "wrong" avenues, then I know i need to modify the keywords that I've listed for taht particular page so that the "right" visitors get to the information on that page.

Let's say you have a page on your site which is about Columbian coffee. If in your keywords you list "Columbian", but not "coffee" as a keyword, you're gonna get a whole lot of people visiting from tourist/political/geographical points of view. You will see this often very clearly by where they are linking from to your site.

So although I'm certain that stats help tremendously with the all-mighty buck, that's not all the are for ;-)

-Julie