Innovation in Software

Here’s a few things you might not know about this blog:

1. Since its inception it has had nearly 30,000 absolute unique visitors
2. Nearly 20% of them (about 5,800) had no referrer set. They had the site bookmarked or typed in the URL (or perhaps were blocking referrer on purpose for giggles)
3. Over 2,000 people return at least once a month with around 180 or so subscribing via RSS. Plenty more never return (makes us sad), and we get deep visitors often, so there are between 10k-20k page views/month
4. However, I have met less than a dozen people who have told me they read the blog. In other words, there are at a guess somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 people reading regularly who I know absolutely nothing about. Well, apart from the fact that they clearly are intelligent, gorgeous and have exquisite taste, natch.

That causes me some problems. With comments only recently being enabled again, I’m kind of at a loss as to who the heck most of you are and who I’m writing for.

A few months ago I asked for you to fill in a rather lengthy survey, the size of which meant the response rate was kind of low. It was still incredibly valuable, and we’re working on the ideas suggested from that exercise, however there are a lot of you who decided not to bother.

Now I have a special 4-question survey that would take a complete moron less than 30 seconds to fill in. In the honest expectation you are not a moron I expect you to do it in a great deal less time than that. All questions are optional and at the very least you’ll get extra followers on Twitter and via RSS from now on.

Take the “Who The Heck Are You?” survey now and win… nothing, to be honest. Other than praise and thanks.

Incidentally, if you decide to provide a postcode or other specific location information, it will be treated with the very strictest of confidence, I’m only interested in aggregate data (it will be separated from the rest of the data before I look at it, promise), I’m not interested in stalking you. Much.