A couple weeks ago I asked you what data-related area you’re most interested in. Thanks to the 831 of you who answered. As I expected, FlowingData readers have a wide array of data-related interests.
This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise since data is just about everywhere you turn. What I didn’t expect though was statistics to lead all areas and programming to only have 6% of all votes. Compare that to a similar poll one year ago where computer science held a strong lead. However, I included web analytics this time around, which I suspect grabbed some from the CS crowd. Information science and cartography also had a strong showing this time around.
Great data to refine your blog with. What a jump from 326 resposes last year to 831 this year. Is that a direct reflection of your traffic growth or do you feel you just had a better “turnaround” this year.
Another congrats for only having a 5% long tail (Other) where last year it was the majority. Great handle on your personas already!
Did you see a growth in #WA sources (or from twitter folks!)
It would be intresting if you categorized your articles (tags) to these targets (personas) to see how evenly the traffic patterns are. I suspect though that like me, we all love the different examples and facts.
I am one of the web analytics folks. Keep up the diversity!
umm, only adds to 99% :-P
@Bosilytics – thanks. it’s definitely from a larger readership than from one year ago. last year, i also left the poll up much longer in the sidebar
@Brian – rounding :)
Consider that the drop in computer science would be more perceptual than statistical. Computer science was not an option in this years poll. People from computer science may have resorted to choosing another topic.
Taking a scientific approach to the poll by standardizing the topics would return better results, but would require much more set up time and be impossible to keep current. Perhaps a standard set and a new trends set in the next one?
I really appreciate your efforts to provide us with daily data ditties. Keep it up. You are providing a great service. I was genuinely upset for about 2 seconds upon reading your April 1st announcement, as I have your blog on the top of my iGoogle feeds and was not pleased with the though of losing it. I get daily inspiration from it…