Hey all,
(Sending this to the public list because it's more transparent and I'd like people who think this data is useful to be able to shout out)
Erik has asked me to write an exploratory app for user-agent data. The idea is to enable Product Managers and engineers to easily explore what users use so they know what to support. I've thrown up an example screenshot at http://ironholds.org/agents_example_screen.png (I'd host it on Commons, inb4Dario, but I'm not sure the copyright status of the UI)
One side-effect of this is that we end up with files of common user agents, split between {readers,editors} and {mobile, desktop}, parsed and unparsed. I'd like to release these files. The reuse potential is twofold; researchers and engineers can use the parsed files to see what browser penetration looks like globally and what browsers should be supported at a top-10, and software engineers can use the unparsed files to improve detection rates.
The privacy implications /should/ be minimal, because of how this data is gathered. The editor data is gathered from the checkuser table, globally, and automatically excludes any user agent used by fewer than 50 distinct usernames. The reader data is gathered from a month of 1:1000 sampled log files, and excludes any agent responsible for fewer than 500 pageviews in a 24 hour period (except, sampled. So, practically speaking, that's 500,000 pageviews)
What do people think about making this a data release? Would people get value from the data, as well as the tool?