Planet Grep survey: Results

I'll start off with the bad news: surveymonkey sucks. Their free offering does not allow me to export the data, expose it to other people, or do anything useful with it beyond seeing a summary and the individual responses. Of course I can go for a paid option, but they charge $19.99 or some such per month. WTF, you can get dedicated blade hosting for half that price. What I've done is manually copy all the data in a database of my own, so that I could do useful things with it. Next time, I think I'll roll my own survey thing.

Anyway.

The full results (apart from the responses free-form question) are available at my site, and will continue to be updated as more results come in; I'm not closing the survey (though I do not expect more results to change things in an earth-shattering manner anymore). In short, after 53 people had responded, the following can be concluded:

• Most people read Planet Grep on a daily frequency (or higher)
• Planet Grep is mostly read by people who actually post to it, too, though definitely not just those people.
• Regarding the amount of content, for each of 'technical/geeky', 'non-technical', 'number of subscribers', 'number of new posts daily', and 'overall', most people replied 'love it'. However, there are subtle differences; for instance, the 'non-technical' option also saw a significant number of people entering 'too much', while the 'technical/geeky' option had a number of people express that they'd like to see more, in various gradations.
• On the topic of, well, content topics, most people seem to agree that Planet Grep is mostly about 'FLOSS development' and 'Using FLOSS software', whereas 'commercial posts' are not welcomed by most readers. Other topics are less clear; 'Development in general' seems expected as part of Planet Grep by most readers, as is 'Politics around FLOSS', though in a somewhat lesser extent. The opinions about 'Non-FLOSS software' are somewhat balanced, while a small majority frown upon posts on 'Life in general'.
• Regarding selective RSS feeds, most people do not seem to think this is necessary. The clear winner here is that such feeds should only be used for Planet Grep 'if the amount of off-topic content would be too high otherwise'.
• Finally, I'm happy to report that most people seem happy about Planet Grep; over 60% of respondents feels that Planet Grep is 'okay, though it could be improved in some areas', the second option which people could choose.

Finally, I also received 17 responses in the final free-form question. Most of these were either thanks or clarifications of earlier questions (or both), which were welcome, but did not otherwise add new information. Two, however, did add new information:

The first was a suggestion to add Tom Bayens to Planet Grep (which I've since done), along with other not further qualified 'influential Belgians in software development'. I'd like to use this opportunity to reiterate the fact that suggestions of blogs are always welcome, either to me or to Kris; if they fit the profile, they'll be added without hesitation. We can't be expected to know each and every Belgian FLOSS person, obviously, so if you think there's someone who belongs on Planet Grep, then please let us know!

The second was a sentiment that 'twitter(-like)' posts do not belong on Planet Grep. I tend to agree with that; Planet Grep is supposed to be a good read, not a statement of what people are doing at a particular point of time, which fits 'regular' blogs more than it fits microblogging.

So there, that's that. I'll be contacting a few people over the next few days and/or weeks, so that I can work out an arrangement which better suits how the Planet Grep readership prefers to see things; but other than that, not much is going to change.