My blog's audience is not your blog's audience

David, aka Mikus, has written a note on the predominance of Windows and IE among the platforms and browsers used by the readers of his blog (according to his server stats). Apparently only 32% of David’s readers use Firefox/Mozilla, and just 3% of them use Linux.

Here are the statistics for the traffic on anaulin.org: 44.17% of my readers use a browser that identifies itself as Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape (41.12%, 2.54% and 0.51%, respectively). And 10.15% use Linux. Surprising; I expected that my Mom’s use of Windows+IE would seriously skew the statistics.

I don’t know if my readership sample is more representative than David’s but, clearly, our blogs are visited by very different types of computer users. We could probably draw some interesting conclusions about the content in a blog just by looking at the platform and browser statistic for that site. For example, I would expect The Daily WTF to have an even heavier skew towards the Linux+Firefox crowd than my blog.

I wonder what are the stats for Slashdot. I bet these days it is mostly Windows+IE users visiting them…