> # of Amazon Purchase Circles containing books on "X"
>
> 1999 2000
>
> "X" = Java 183 359
> "X" = Perl 268 82
I don't know how you could draw any conclusion from this, and
certainly it's not meaningful to draw any conclusion about the use of
Perl in business, because most of the purchase circles are not
companies. The typical purchase circle is something like 'People who
live in Prattvile, Alabama'.
Here is a rough breakdown of the types of purchase circles this year:
CATEGORY FOR EXAMPLE APPROX # OF CIRCLES
Government U.S. Navy 17
U.S. States Alaska 55
Countries Panama 85
Cities & Towns Bentonville, AR 3570
Companies Ziff-Davis Inc. 850
Educational Oberlin College 450
Misc Smithsonian Inst. 18
Of the 5,132 purchase circles that you sampled, about 70% are for
groups like 'Bentonville AR.' I think it would be more meaningful to
look at the rankings of Perl vs. Java in just the 850 corporate
purchase circles. I don't think it would be a lot more meaningful,
because counting purchase circles gives the same weight to Ziff-Davis
as it does to pobox.com, but it would be a start.
Raw data is available from
http://www.plover.com/~mjd/perl/ama/
if anyone else wants to take a closer look.
Mark-Jason Dominus [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I am boycotting Amazon. See http://www.plover.com/~mjd/amazon.html for details.
