Great Backyard Plone Count Results

First off, I want to thank all of you who participated in this year's GBPC.  We garnered 219 sites, which is up 19% from 2009.  We had contributions from Canada, Germany, Italy, U.K., and U.S.  Considering that Delicious has 2016 sites tagged with "plone-site" and Plone.net lists 1955, we've collected a sample of over 10% of the easily known Plone sites. 

Industries that were listed included education (53), non-profit (24), government (14), healthcare(11), small business (8), assoications (6), arts & entertainment (5), and environmental (5) plus 45 others.  Thirty were private intranets, so in that regard the GBPC was useful in getting a sample of sites that are normally out of sight. 

Of interest to me and Jukka Ojaniemi was the usability column this year.  52% of the sites reported had a self-reported rating of 3 ("Awesome"), 27% had a rating of 2 ("Alright"), and only 3% sucked.  About 19% lacked a usability score since they were confirmed from last year without further updating.  A little spot checking of sites with different scores show a fair amount of unevenness in the ratings--some clean, even elegant sites scored low while similar ones did very well.  Overall however, I'd say that Plone lends itself to uncluttered, easy to navigate sites. 

I'll be digging around in the data in the weeks ahead but for now the raw data is at the Google Docs spreadsheet.  From Twitter today Nate Aune suggested using Celery and Scrape.py to crawl and scrape for a web-wide search for Plone sites.  Expect a more complete Plone census as I work on that.