Using Digg Referrals to Speculate on International Technology Levels

Way too nerdy a post title for my usual stuff, but then, I'm a pretty nerdy guy.

So, my last post got frontpaged on digg.com over the weekend, causing a pretty huge number of new visitors to come to the site. I'm a Canadian/American dual citizen, and while most of my long-term recurring visitors are from the US and Canada, having a pretty public post like this always gives me the opportunity to work towards some pretty crazy conclusions.

Like, international technology levels - or at the very least, the quickness of the varying countries in discovering the post on digg/del.icio.us/etc.

As per usual, the day (April 28th) started off pretty normally - fridays are fairly busy here at philrenaud.com. 41% US Commercial. 21% Canadian. 8% UK. The usual suspects.

Then I made the post at 10:00PM. By midnight, a few people had started rolling in from digg.com traffic - 86% North American. Higher than normal. By 2AM, it's dropped a bit, but not much: 82%, after about 300 uniques.

I go to sleep, and wake up for a rollerblade (yeah, that's right. I've been excercising. what of it?) around 9:00AM on Saturday, to see that things have ballooned. The server is running around 140 requests/minute, and it's a bit slow. Checking my stats, each hour the north american majority is dropping - at 70% between 9:00 and 10:00, just 8% above what my average is. By noon when I get back, it's gone - suddenly, the brits have struck up a storm (six hours ahead of eastern time, so just before supper time for them) and are holding at around 23%. No real movement from anywhere else in Europe, and Australia's up from it's usual 2% to 5%.

South America makes the next strike - Chile and Argentina each jump up to the 10% mark by the time my pizza's delivered in the late afternoon and I sit down to watch my Tigers take the Twins to town. Pretty much stays at this level overnight, with the Canadian and American hits diminishing down to about the 45% mark, almost 20% below average. Japan has climbed from 4% to 11%, and by the early morning on Sunday, Europe is catching up: Austria, the Netherlands, France and Germany combine to make up 24%, and Russia throws another 9% of its own on top.

China strikes by late Sunday evening, jumping from < 1% to 5%, and believe it or not, I actually got a couple hits from North Korea. No idea how that works out, but I'm not about to probe into the matter.

This morning when I woke up, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, and India all made significant jumps (at least trippled their norms, each) and the North American recurrents were showing a majority again.

So, I'm not sure how to categorize this. Am I suddenly a globally significant body? Definitely not. Does this say anything about technology levels? Maybe a little. I'd like to think that a few of the Asian countries and some of the Western European ones would've shown interest sooner, but in all fairness, it probably just speaks more about the state of interest in Web Design more than anything else. Even there, I'm not too sure.

I am sure that I feel pretty good about this whole transnational trend with this blog. So good, in fact, that I'm going to start going by Ambassador Phil. Yes. That has a very nice ring to it.

(Oh, and a big PS to anybody that's new around here: I'm Phil. I try to post every day [usually about 2/3 of all days though], and it's only sometimes design-related. It's a pretty down to earth place - make yourself at home)

Thanks for the comments: Justin McGonigle, Dave Werner, Ivan, Laura, Gerk (who doesn't quite get it, I'm afraid), Krizdabz, Brandon, Hakan Bilgin.

« Previous Post | Next Post »