tecosystems 2009: What You Read, How You Read It, and Where You Read it From

I’m a bit late with the 2009 retrospective, I know, but I had better things to do on my winter vacation. Like trying to stop the apartment from bleeding heat. Yes, my winter vacation was all home improvement and no tropical getaway. But at least I didn’t have to get on a plane.

Anyway, I touched on one of the important observed metrics for me from 2009, the trendline towards bloated posts. But I thought you might be interested in some other data on the happenings around here.

Top Twenty Posts Read in 2009, By Pageviews

Two quick notes: first, I’ve filtered out a few of the HowTo type articles because they do disproportionate traffic as references of a sort. Second, I’ve included in parentheses the PostRank score for each piece. While they get a little wonky from time to time, they’re a more nuanced look at performance as they include engagement metrics – comments, Twitter links, etc – which complement the more simple pageview numbers used here in ranking.

Pageview rankings are courtesy of Google Analytics.

1. What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions (10)
2. Google Wave: Tsunami or Microwave? The Q&A (10)
3. Linux vs OpenSolaris…Again: The Q&A (1.0)
4. Open Source and the Cloud: Where’s the LAMP? (10)
5. The Oracle Predicts a Setting Sun (8.7)
6. Oracle, MySQL and the EU: The Q&A (9.6)
7. The View from HadoopWorld (9.9)
8. Five Developer Blogs You Should Read (NA – this post is five years old, just FYI)
9. VMware Taps a new SpringSource: The Q&A (7.3)
10. Firefox: Hearing Chromium’s Footsteps? (6.8)
11. Question for Cloud Campers: The Cloud and Standards (10)
12. AGPL: Open Source Licensing in a Networked Age (9.1)
13. What Would the Operating System Look Like if It Were Designed Today? The Chrome OS Q&A (3.7)
14. Ask Not What the Zend Server Can Do To Java, But What It Can Do For PHP (9.0)
15. The Open Database Alliance and the Future of MySQL (2.4)
16. Clouds Rolling In: The Google App Engine Q&A
17. Does the GPL Matter? In a Word, Yes (8.9)
18. DTrace vs SystemTap, Redux (8.3)
19. Cloud Types: Fabric vs Instance (9.8)
20. Amazon, RDS and the Future of MySQL (6.9)

Top Four Browsers

Firefox is still the reigning champ around these parts, as expected, with IE predictably lagging significantly. Of moderate surprise is Chrome placing behind Safari: enough of the power users I know have switched that I expected that number to be a bit higher. But with its general market share hovering around 1%, I suppose eight and a quarter qualifies as an outperform.

1. Firefox: 52.48%
2. Internet Explorer: 21.85%
3. Safari: 9.85%
4. Chrome: 8.25%

Top Ten Operating Systems

Still a massive Windows majority, but Linux besting Mac tells you something about the audience around here. Otherwise, I’m a bit surprised at iPhone and Android numbers, respectively, but then again, people probably have better things to read when they’re out and about than this blog.

1. Windows – 58.70%
2. Linux – 19.45%
3. Macintosh – 18.32%
4. iPhone – 1.70%
5. SunOS – 0.75%
6. (not set) – 0.43%
7. Android – 0.20%
8. iPod – 0.20%
9. SymbianOS – 0.07%
10. BlackBerry – 0.06%

Top Ten Countries of Origin

174 countries visited the site in 2009. That’s not too bad at all. Here are the top ten, by visits.

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Canada
4. Germany
5. India
6. Australia
7. France
8. Netherlands
9. Sweden
10. China

Top Three Keyword Searches

These were interesting, I thought. More on the keyword searches later.

1. opensolaris vs linux
2. developer blogs
3. 2010 predictions