Discuss: The Survey, 2008

by ALA Staff

11 link to banner?

I accidently clicked out of the page and would like the image and link to the survey. It was when you completed it. Any luck on passing it on? :)

posted at 04:38 am on July 30, 2008 by si capitan

12 Geography

Moshe said :

I’m from middle east, and in your list, middle east dose not exist Did you see ever anyone from middle east who using the web or doing web programming? Look at the order: North America!!, South America!! , Europe!! I’m suggesting to take a look to your geography books.

Actually, we used the United Nations Statistics Division’s Standard Country and Area Codes Classifications to group countries by continent.

posted at 05:19 am on July 30, 2008 by Eric Meyer

Nice, middle east is part of Asia, but from usability perspective, it’s nice to consider it as different region.
Some peoples don’t know that middle east is in Asia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East
At least we can consider it as Cradle of civilization and religions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia

posted at 06:06 am on July 30, 2008 by mohsen basirat

14 Continental division

@Mohsen That’s definitely true, but look at it in terms of continental division. Australia is nearly the size of North America, but it gets a classification under [em]Oceania[/em].

Division by religion and cultural flags can get a bit too political. I guess that’s why it’s been divided by continental groupings :)

posted at 11:17 am on July 30, 2008 by Pasquale D'Silva

15 Same as last year :-(

Still the same problem as last year – as a hobbyist web writer with a full-time job doing something completely non-web-related, I found it impossible to answer some of the questions.

eg, when you are asking about salaries etc, is it just the salary for my web work (which is limited to a very occasional cheque from Google AdSense), or is it the salary for my full-time job?

posted at 03:24 pm on July 30, 2008 by Stephen Down

16 Untitled

@ Mohsen:

Nice, middle east is part of Asia, but from usability perspective, it’s nice to consider it as different region. Some peoples don’t know that middle east is in Asia.

Well, right, but if you’re working/living in the Middle East, don’t you probably know it’s part of Asia? You said yourself you know the Middle East is part of Asia. Assuming one’s English is reasonably sound, I’m guessing any sensible adult can determine which continent he lives on.

posted at 04:27 pm on July 30, 2008 by amber simmons

17 Hobbyists

Sorry, Stephen . If you selected the choice “I do most of my work as a student, hobbyist, volunteer, or other uncompensated role” then you should not have gotten any questions about salary— I didn’t get it when I did a test run and picked that option, though I did (appropriately, I think, at least in general) get questions about yearly income and hourly billing rates.

We did try to tune the questions a little bit better for hobbyists, but perhaps we fell short. Like the profession itself, the survey itself evolves from year to year, so we’ll always have another chance to make it better with help from the community.

posted at 04:53 pm on July 30, 2008 by Eric Meyer

18

Thanks, everyone, for taking the survey, and for sharing your feedback. A couple of quick points:

I will take part in the surver, as I did last year, but with a very targeted viewership of business professionals of well over 30,000, surely it would be possible to attract a related sponsor who would provide some sort of prize for one lucky person as a further incentive to take part?

For a survey like this, it is important to avoid commercial sponsorship, lest the commercial relationship influence (or be perceived to influence) the neutrality of the data. At least one organization I respect runs a survey like this with backing from a commercial sponsor, and I in no way mean to impugn that organization. I’m just saying what feels right to us.

A List Apart, An Event Apart, and Happy Cog paid for the prizes last year. Our companies also paid the considerably higher expenses involved in hiring the best data analysts we could find, and will do so again this year.

Given the overwhelming community response last year, it didn’t seem necessary to do giveaways this year.