"In terms of web performance, the experience we need to measure is user perceived page load time, and the single number we need to extract depends on the distribution of measurements across the sample. There are a few contenders for what the magic number should be. Do you use the mean, median, mode, or something else? How do you determine the correctness of this number or whether your sample size is large enough? Is one number sufficient?"

codepo8: A must read for your web dev teams! > RT @charlesarthur: Why we should support users with no Javascript >> Punkchip http://bit.ly/h55ILx

"Global shipments of smartphones and tablets surpassed shipments of desktop PCs and notebooks in Q42010. This gap is expected to increase over the next few years." Blimey.

"An acquaintance asked, somewhat grumpily, if anything good had happened in the past decade". Always look on the bright side...

"While 2% of U.S. visitors may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that over 300 million users visit the Yahoo! homepage each month. That means 6 million users visit each month without the benefit of JavaScript. So even though it’s worth spending your time on the JavaScript-enabled version of the site, there are still a non-trivial amount of users out there who won’t be able to use it. While the percentage of visitors with JavaScript disabled seems like a low number, keep in mind that small percentages of big numbers are also big numbers."

Lots of interesting bits here but the stats in particular stand out. "The death toll is not small. The UK, despite having an excellent road safety record, sees more people killed on the roads every year than died during the entire duration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; "According to the World Health Organization motor vehicle collisions are the 6th most common cause of death in developed nations, with an average rate of 20.8 per 100,000 populations in the year 2000 (30.8 for males, 11.0 for females). African nations have the world's highest road traffic injury mortality rates." (Wikipedia on traffic-related death rates.) 1.2 million were killed and 50 million injured in road traffic accidents in 2004."

Not totally convinced by the results shown here but potentially a useful starting point.

"Despite marketers' embrace of the medium, brands are finding themselves on the outside of the conversation. Of the 90% of Twitter messages sent by real people -- the other 10% come from businesses -- only 12% ever mention a brand, and most of those mentions are of Twitter itself. Further, only 1% of consumer tweets that mention a brand are part of an active conversation with that brand, meaning marketers are, for the most part, conducting one-way conversations -- the opposite of the way consumers often use Twitter."

"In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy. And yet, almost imperceptibly, numbers are infiltrating the last redoubts of the personal. Sleep, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed."

"Analysis: The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products."

"What makes my heart go pitty-pat is the swarm of data that the sensor in the wheel captures and transmits. Not only does it track info about the biker (riding time, effort, calories) but it also grabs info from the environment, like temperature, carbon monoxide, noise and humidity. You can share this info with friends, and also with your city by making an anonymous donation of your data. The end result? A community of data-contributors helping cities build more accurate models of routes, noise, carbon emissions and temperature. All this data can be used inform urban planning, transit systems and environmental policies in service to sustainable cities."

"I’m interested in looking at the loudness for the recordings of a number of artists to see how wide-spread this loudness war really is. To do this I used the Echo Nest remix API and a bit of Python to collect and plot loudness for a set of recordings. I did two experiments. First I looked at the loudness for music by some of my favorite or well known artists. Then I looked at loudness over a large collection of music."

"What do we sing about, when we sing about the body? The chart below, based on a sample of thousands songs, tells the story. The size of a circle corresponds to how often that part is mentioned in each genre."

"The prototype Datastore for London. This is where we’ll be releasing all of the Greater London Authority’s data for all Londoners to see and use free of charge."

Very detailed A/B testing presentation.

"Each participant was asked to rate more than 100 search ranking factors along with specific questions about hot issues in the SEO field. This document [helps] provide transparency into what matters (and doesn’t) for best practices in search engine optimization."

"Wikia measures exit rate - the percentage of users that leave the site from a given page. Here they show that exit rate drops as pages get faster. The exit rate goes from ~15% for a 2 second page to ~10% for a 1 second page. This is another data point to add to the list of stats from Velocity that show that faster pages is not only better for users, it’s better for business."

"This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason."

"Graph mentions of any word on national U.S. television"

Statistics, data munging and vizualization.

"Dynamic visualizations for the iPhone."

"Graphs of how often things feature on guardian.co.uk"

"Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend."

Includes estimates by age group.

"In December 2008 through January 2009, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. We received 1121 valid responses to the screen reader survey, which was conducted Dec. 2008 - Jan. 2009. The response was amazing."

"The latest data from AdMob, the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, shows that Apple now dominates the mobile web in the U.S. with a 48% market share. This growth, interestingly enough, does not just come from the iPhone, but the iPod touch also saw a meteoric rise in usage during the last month."

Sounds dead handy. In beta. "Band Metrics helps musicians and bands analyze and measure the success of their music."

"The company states that in August, their mobile browser Opera Mini was used by approximately 17.3 million users, who viewed more than 4.1 billion pages - about 242 pages per user, per month."

"Driven by iTunes and the iPod, Gen Y has a voracious appetite for digital music, ring tones and all things mobile."

"As of November 2007 there were 3.3 billion mobile phone subscriptions around the world. At 6.6 billion people globally, yes, there is a mobile phone subscription for half of the planet. But that is not really the whole story. So lets delve deeper into these numbers."

"One of the more interesting things I’ve found is what is happening in the bottom 1.5 to .5% of the browsers that are hitting our sites. I’m starting to see devices appear en masse which are not PC’s."

Good perspective on Flash/browser penetration from John Dowdell at Adobe.

Trends over time for job advert keywords.

"A new report out today appears to confirm that a broad economic slowdown in the United States is starting to negatively effect the online ad industry."

Looks great but, ooh, expensive!

"Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools."

"Chinwag's monthly snapshot of market conditions, career satisfaction, salary views, and more."

"The 2007 Digital Economy Fact Book (pdf) is a tightwad researcher’s dream: In-depth, statistic-heavy, well-cited, and freely-available online. One could hardly ask for more."

"Twitter meter let's you query an index of all the words that have been sent to twitter's public timeline since [...] 11/6/2007 and plot the number of times that word was used over time."

"Google on Wednesday said it has seen 50 times more search requests coming from Apple iPhones than any other mobile handset -- a revelation so astonishing that the company originally suspected it had made an error culling its own data."

"A new study released today by a consortium of big players in advertising found hard numbers to back up what you might have guessed. Specifically, that only 6% of people online are contributing 50% of the clicks to display advertisements."

"Go beyond the old Page View model and start to measure engagement. Understand your users' activities and how they interact with the various features of your site."

"Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in people of working age in the UK"

"According to new figures from Nielsen Online some online video sites have doubled their audience since the strike began."

"For shared visualization and discovery."

"Explore and compare data, graphs and maps, Share insights via email, blog or data downloads, Upload the data you care about."

"A new study by Simmons, a unit of Experian Research Services has found that consumers are 47% more engadged by ads that run with television programs viewed online than those watched on a TV set."

Flickr now has stats for pro users. Nice.

"We predict internet advertising to pass three milestones over the next three years," ZenithOptimedia's forecast said. "We expect it to overtake radio advertising in 2008; to attain a double-digit share of global advertising in 2009; and to overtake magaz

"77% of today’s online youth would rather live without television than live without the Internet."

Clever. "Use the filters to find the right chart type for your needs. Then download as Excel or PowerPoint templates and insert your data."

"Responsible for providing estimates of the number of people watching television. This includes which channels and programmes are being watched, at what time, and the type of people who are watching at any one time."

"The organisation that compiles television ratings in the United Kingdom [..] currently, BARB have approximately 5,100 homes". How crazy is it that 5,100 households dictate UK TV ratings? Will VOD fix this?

"A systematic analysis of the 100 most popular applications - those that have at least 1million users - in an attempt to get a better grasp on favoured activities that take place in this global playground."

"Click streams have made room for bounce rates, search analytics, and so much more. If we play our cards right, we can reduce and synthesize the raw data and give our clients more meaningful information that foments action."

"When building a web app, reporting is the last thing on many feature lists. Clear reporting is vitally important for the long term success of your web app and managing your growth."

"Server log files are inappropriate for gathering usability data. They are meant to provide server administrators with data about the behavior of the server, not the behavior of the user."