David Cloutman pointed to Craiglist’s job ads as an indicator of programming language popularity. Here’s the hit counts for “web design jobs” and “internet engineering jobs” in the Bay Area:

 
PHP
Java
Ruby
Python
PERL

internet engineering jobs
167
246
85
98
109

web design jobs
110
71
22
19
31

Cloutman has a few ideas for what the numbers mean, but I’m just entertained by the data. (Note: he corrected his original [...]

Posted July 15, 2008 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Technology. Tags: java, languages, perl, php, popularity, programming, python, ruby. Be the first one.

A chat with Ryan Eby, also an Edward Tufte fan, elicited this line about another reason we continue to struggle with the design of our catalogs:
data isn’t usable by itself
if it was then the OPAC would just be marc displays
And yesterday I was speaking with Corey Seeman about how to measure and use “popularity” information [...]

Posted January 21, 2006 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: corey seeman, data visualization, libraries, library, library 2.0, library catalog, metrics, opac, opac 2.0, popularity, ryan eby, search rank, search ranking. 3 Comments.

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s [...]

Posted November 1, 2005 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia. One Comment.