The 6ht 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.  If your input from February 2013 is still current, you're already done. 

That said, the input form on the Google Docs spreadsheet is open.  Anyone can submit sightings of Plone in the wild.  The form will stay open until midnight Monday 17 February.  I'll be doing some mining of Delicious and other social bookmarking services this month 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 sixth annual Backyard Plone Count (since 2009) 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!

Plone and Mobile

In keeping with my New Year's Resolution, here's installment #2 of my promised monthly Plone Metrics.  I'm likely to be one up this month, since I traditionally run the Great Backyard Plone Count in parallel with the Audubon Society's Great Backyard Bird Count and this year that will be February 14-17. 

Meanwhile, I just finished drafting an abstract for the INMM information analysis technical meeting this May in Portland.  I'll be presenting my thoughts on mobile technologies and their impact on nuclear nonproliferation.  With that in mind, I turned to Google Analytics to see how Plone.org is doing with regard to mobile.

The data set begins in September of 2009, when Google started collecting mobile device infomation.  It's clearly increasing and in step with growth in the mobile use of the web. 

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has been tracking "cell internet users" since 2009 and the findings shouldn't be a surprise.  In 2009 31% of all cellphone users browsed the web with their device.  That has doubled to 63% in 2013.

Since 91% of Americans own a cellphone, that's 57% of everyone in the U.S. using their cellphone to access the web or check e-mail.  I assume that similar trends exist for much of the developed world.  In developing countries, matters are not lagging far behind--89.4% of the population subscribe to mobile services.  Almost 20% are broadband subscriptions.   (Thanks, MobiThinking.)

For the moment, Plone.org is growing linearly with regard to mobile.  Here's the data exported into  Open Office Calc with a regression line run through it.  The fit is reasonably good with R² over 0.83 across 52 months of data since late Q3 2009.

Meanwhile, here's what Plone.org looks like on my Droid.  (I wanted to get a screenshot with Google Glass, but the voice recognition keeps insisting that I'm searching for "clone.") 

And here's the usual Drupal comparision.

And finally, just to widen the field a bit, here's the mobile screenshot for Liferay.

This last one is interesting because its format is one of  a long, long vertically scrolling page.  I'll save an examination of the UX of these mobile interfaces for another time.  I include Liferay here because it's only three stops away on the Green Line in Real Story Group's CMS subway diagram.

The Green Line is Portals and Content Integration.  More on this subway map later, but I need to hold back something for March.