Technorati has Plone posts averaging a little under 20 per day for the last month with a total of 6866 posts in 134 blogs. By way of comparison, Drupal is listed with 12,853 posts in 2269 blogs. Joomla has 10,742 posts in 1389 blogs. SharePoint: 11,305 in 1451. Alfresco: 447 in 58. Openedit: 11 in 1. DotNet Nuke: 8 in 5.
What is one to make of this? Of course, first, its all just numbers. There could just as easily by 6800 outstanding posts for Plone and 12,000 dirges for Drupal or the other way around. But clearly the buzz is, whether good or bad, is more about Drupal than anyone else.
However, there appears to be more than just the usual continuum in these numbers. We've got four CMS that each are in the many thousands of blogs and three that are only in double digits or less.
Even so, there's yet another way to look at things: posts per blog. Take a look at this summary table sorted in descending order by posts/blog.
| CMS | Posts | Blogs | Posts/blog | |
| Plone | 6866 | 134 | 51.2 | |
| Openedit | 11 | 1 | 11.0 | |
| SharePoint | 11305 | 1451 | 7.8 | |
| Joomla | 10742 | 1389 | 7.7 | |
| Alfesco | 447 | 58 | 7.7 | |
| Drupal | 12853 | 2269 | 5.7 | |
| DotNet Nuke | 8 | 5 | 1.6 |
Wow! Plone blows everything on the chart away, even the newcomer and statistical outlier Openedit barely makes it above 10 posts/blog. Darci is on to something here--Plone bloggers may not be as numerous as SharePoint's or Drupal's, but they are either very active or have been at it for a long time. (Case in point, Plone Metrics has had 70 posts since last October.)
BTW, with all this poking about in blogs, I did turn up some interesting reading. Limi's latest on simplifying Plone and the editing experience is a good place to start. Don't miss Christian Schlotz's posting on Data Portability.
I also stumbled upon an NGO on "Ask Metafilter" asking for a comparison of Plone and Drupal. Of the 15 comments, most were adamantly anti-Plone, but seemed to be ill-informed, based on incomplete or obsolete knowledge. I'll have to register at Metafilter ($5, bummer) and then post an up-to-date Plone advocacy comment over there.
2 comments:
The only thing is of course if you take "blog about Plone" as goal then it hasn't reached it. Then not the number of posts/blog makes it but also the number of blogs.
And I think we need to work on that. And if it's technorati then it's also probably more on where it's mentioned not necessarily a blog about it.
I quite agree that we could improve the absolute number of blogs. I don't know what a reasonable goal for that number should be, but without information on the quality of posts, this is fraught with difficulty. I think posts/blog is a weak but real surrogate for quality.
I also agree with your remark about Technorati. Just a mention of Plone (or Drupal or SharePoint) gives you a score. I'd love to do some data mining and see if I could untangle casual mention from significant contributions.
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