Learn & Tell

For the graphs below, I was most curious about PHP, MySQL, Java, and ASP.NET.

Found this graph of O’Reilly book sales:

And then did this search for job trends:

Java, as suspected, is clearly the winner in both categories. What I thought was interesting was that, in terms of book sales, PHP sales are more steady than Java books and are currently about half of what Java sales are. But if you look at job trends, Java is dominantly and consistently approximately four times as more prevalent. So based on these fairly off-the-cuff metrics, I would guess that there’s people out there learning PHP for their own purposes, their own startups (ie. digg is PHP), etc.

Make of it what you will. I like the numbers.

Two interesting and related articles I recently read that got me thinking about massive redundancy, power consumption, and the move toward less power-needy CPUs. The move toward more efficient CPUs means less focus on clock rate, which is a fundamental shift in the way we’ve looked at R&D for CPUs historically.

Today Google rules a total database of hundreds of petabytes, swelled every 24 hours by terabytes
Source: Wired’s article on cloudware

And I’m sure this won’t seem like much in the near future. There’s a 1-terabyte hard drive coming out soon or possibly its already out and I’m behind the times yet again.

That’s one exciting thing about this field of technology: constant, 24 hour, ceaseless innovation and evolution. Just 20 years ago I had a Commodore 64. It was called a 64 because it had 64K of RAM. For a refresher course, after Kilobytes comes Megabytes, then Gigabytes (my MacBook hard drive now is 80GB), then Terabytes, then Petabytes (Google houses approximately 200 petabytes), then Exabytes. And I don’t even know (right now) what is after that, but I’m sure we’ll be there sooner than we think. So much information.

What delights me about so much information, so much data, is the chance to analyze the data for trends never before realized in the history of mankind. From the mundane (what time do most people watch videos of dogs skateboarding) to the more business-oriented intelligence (how many times does a person look at a product before they buy), this stuff is interestng. And, to get a bit more lofty, perhaps it reveals that as a global community, human beings aren’t all that different from one another. Same lumps of flesh with different nooks and crannies and variances, but basically the same computers in our skulls…

And this other article is about the dangers of data corruption. What would happen if Google lost its massive redundancy and lost all of that information? Sure, the web could be scoured again, sure this information is hidden elsewhere. But what about a massive power failure and critical hard drive corruption and, what the founder of CouchSurfing.com describes as “the perfect storm” of irretrievable data loss. Here is his letter of regret about how two negligent System Administrators managed to bring down a business with 90,000 registered users overnight:

TechCrunch DeadPool: Couchsurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down

Imagine if the web went down, even for a day. How would you look up a phone number? Find driving directions? Buy a new book? Read the news? I guess you’d have to go take a walk and tend to your garden.

Its fun to read about people who had a good idea and the passion to see it through. Here’s an article in BusinessWeek about the founder of digg.com and how he got where he is today:
Valley Boys

Mmm, more data. Take a look at this article, The State of the Blogosphere from David Sifry of Technorati.

There’s some very interesting graphs and charts to peruse. Especially interesting to me were these two:

This indicates that English is the dominant blogging language on the web, but that Japanese is a close second.

And this next one indicates that English speakers perhaps blog while at work, while Japanese are more likely to do so before or after work. Of course, this statement doesn’t take into account the likely large number of students who are blogging.

Read the article for more interesting data crunching.

I happened to catch the Colbert report the other night when Stephen Colbert was defining “Wikiality” as a new reality. He argues, for example, that if you want to say that the Panama Canal opened in 1941, not 1914, that’s your right. And now, with wikipedia, you can. It was hilarious stuff.

Video here:

Then today I see this article from the Wikimania conference about the $100 laptop:

A few minutes ago here at the Wikimania conference, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced that the One Laptop Per Child Project is including Wikipedia as one of the first elements in their content repository. (ac: though they’ve been talking about this for at least a year.)

• Source: Jimmy Wales Announces $100 Laptop Partnership, Wikiversity, Wikiwyg

One might wonder what the impacts might be to Wikipedia. Global Wikiality? Stephen, are you listening?

The fact that ebay is not allowing meebome on its listings sounds a LOT like what they did against PayPal way back when. And PayPal fought long and hard and users liked PayPal better than the ebay payment system. Eventually, ebay just bought PayPal. But since ebay already owns Skype, and Skype is so well-established, do you think that ebay may also buy meebome? Maybe only if the meebome user base grows substantially to be a real competitor with Skype… The technology is reproducible…

• Link: eBay rejects Meebome, saying it is against policy

As of tomorrow, Learn & Tell will have been on the web for only two weeks. Because of successful SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices such as a Google Sitemap plugin and a few submissions to digg, some interesting content, and a little luck, people all around the world have read articles on Learn & Tell. I’m a bit amazed how quickly it spreads, but hopefully this is just the beginning!

Unique visitors to site in first two weeks: 319
Total number of visits: 394
Average number of visits per day: 28.14
Number of pageviews: 933
Average number of pageviews per day: 66.64
Here’s a graph of the people from around the world that have viewed Learn & Tell:

In-Bound Link (IBL) Quality. This is a measurement of key elements on the page containing an in-bound link which, in combination, influence the link reputation for the target of the link. This is the only factor that had the same level of relative influence across the search engines and happened to be the most influential in all cases.

• Executive Summary SEMLogic Findings

P.S. Also note that I’ve added a “web” category and will start adding more web-related items into this category, even though they may not be typical Learn & Tell material…