I’m working on a pretty important website and was wondering if it is timely to introduce some CSS3 and fancy fonts. A simple question on twitter turned into a very interesting stats session where many webmasters and tech boffins shared their browser stats. These are numbers from many of the most popular sites in Iceland.

Ingi Gauti stepped up and offered the stats from barnaland.is Icelandic equivalent of Craigslist come Mothers united.

Ingi also shared this brilliant screenshot where he politely points out to IE6 users that their browser is an 8 year old piece of crap.

Hugi followed suit and published data from the government road traffic directorate.

Hannes from TM Software offered stats from a “popular” Icelandic site. They run many of the main screen realestate in Iceland so it’s anyones guess which site he’s referring to.

Siggi Árni joined in with data from Landsbankinn.is one of the main banks in Iceland.

… and finally Rósa Stef gave us insight into two of her sites

All of this gathered on Twitter within a couple of hours.

Scientific summary concludes that we’re hovering around 1% IE6 usage in Iceland except that odd site from Rósa.

So I’m putting a nail in the coffin and stop testing this browser specifically. Of course everything will degrade gracefully and all that jazz, but I’m not wasting any more time on making things pixel perfect for this ancient fiend.

I have been chatting to the guys at Clara for a while about making some kind of an index for Icelandic startup companies. I even have some wireframes for a CrunchBase style social network but it has been put on ice for now.

Brian Suda sent me this link where Josh Russel recently open sourced their Brighton Wifi map. So I set to work 2 hours ago and pulled in some resources to map the Icelandic startup scene.

The current map has the companies in the top of my mind and my fellow crowdsourcing followers on Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully more will follow suit and we’ll have this close to reality some day soon.

So check out the map of Icelandic Startup Companies and add to it if you find some missing. Who knows, you might have an investor at your door tomorrow!

I might buy a domain for this at some point…

Companies are realizing that there might be some value in a solid social media strategy while the Icelandic advertising agencies don’t seem to meet the demand.

Community managers are a scarce resource on our island but I’ve compiled a short list. Mainly to save some time when I need to pull the info next time.

It is an open spreadsheet for editing so feel free to add to it.

At the time of writing it contains:

No real surprises there, similar to the US except for the proportionally larger representation of 16-20 year olds.

The age distribution is similar to other countries but I expected a higher female proportion. Clickity click and numbers from theNational Registry shed some light. We have roughly 47% of the male population and 57% of the female population on Facebook

The numbers you get from Facebook are all rounded and rough estimates but still an interesting exercise. I published the Google Spreadsheet for those interested in taking this further.