The Code Wizard blog posted some anecdotal evidence of attention span varying as a function of nationality.
The author looked through the visitor statistics on his blog and observed that Americans spend less time per page than visitors from other countries. Visitors from Canada, Australia, and England spend far more time per page and click more links while they’re there. I’m not aware of anything in the content of the blog that would be intrinsically more interesting to folks outside the US.
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John Venier 06.20.08 at 08:39
Maybe Americans are just more efficient? Or our scripts are?
A lot of times links in blogs point to resources where jargon is explained, or technology is discussed in greater depth, or people are described, etc. If one is familiar with the terms in the first place one would be less likely to click the links. So my guess is that someone from another country and culture would be more likely to click links. Similarly, understanding a blog entry is probably easier for folks who come from a similar background and have similar knowledge.
An interesting experiment would be to see if the same holds true for Brittish blogs written by and for Brits.
Also, the character of the group of people with the most internet access may well differ by country, and the goals of those folks probably differ as well. It might be interesting to compare only the top ten visitors per country; this may exclude a lot of ‘Sunday drivers’, high school students, and others who are only casually browsing and not necessarily very interested in the content anyway.
On the other hand, think about a statistics blog which has an entry on gun ownership and crime rates. The statisticians might well glance at it, quickly understand the data sources and analysis which was done, and move on without clicking any of the links to ‘Gauss’ or ‘correlation’ or ‘causation’ or ‘inference’ or ‘median’, etc. If it is not a new study they may well have already read about it in depth.
But the topic is likely to also attract folks interested gun legislation, sociology, criminology, and that strange breed who call in to talk radio shows. Those folks might be unfamiliar with statistics and pore over the entry, reading every detail many times to understand it, and clicking every link to learn what the terms mean.
If you could tell who belonged to which group by IP address (maybe segregating by ISP into probable home users versus academic institution versus government versus other business) you might conclude that professional and academic statisticians have a much lower attention span than non-statisticians.
Now this may well be true, but I would think in this case that the evidence points more clearly to a difference in familiarity with the subject.