The 5th Annual Great Backyard Plone Count

It's that time of year... the Great Backyard Bird Count, organized by the Audubon Society, the Cornell Institute of Ornithology, and Bird Studies Canada.  And that means that it's also time for the Great Backyard Plone Count, this weekend Friday through Monday.

Because many Plone sites are intranets behind firewalls, they can't be located by crawling the web.  This is a chance for developers, site owners, and users to stand up and be counted.  It's a non-scientific, totally voluntary effort for self-reporting Plone-based web portals.  Last year's results are posted at this Google Docs spreadsheet.  If your input from February 2012 is still current, you're already done. 

That said, the input form on the Google Docs spreadsheet will soon be open.  Anyone can submit sightings of Plone in the wild.  I'll be doing some mining of Delicious and other social bookmarking services this weekend and posting them as well. 

Although there's significant bias in a survey like this, the real value comes from tracking trends over time.  This is the fifth annual Backyard Plone Count (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012) and as the number of yearly data points increase, we'll better be able to extrapolate from the observations.  It's not that we're getting an absolute count of Plone market penetrations (just like the GBBC isn't counting individual birds), it's just that we're getting a repeatable sampling by the community.  It is as much a measure of community involvement as it is a metric of the actual number of Plone sites out there.

So get out there and spot some Plone sites -- and while you're at it, spend a little time counting birds at your feeder.

Thanks in advance!