"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Plone "Industries"

I was building a spreadsheet for a nefarious purpose tonight and needed a list of the types of domains within which Plone is used. So I went over to Plone.net's site listing and viewed the page source. There I was able to cut-and-paste the tags for the "Industry" pull-down list. A few moments with a text-to-columns tool and I had my list.

While I was at it, I took the time to count the number of sites listed within each category. I offer these not as absolute numbers, but as relative frequencies. After all, Plone.net is a self-reporting site.

Industry Count
Accounting 5
Aerospace and Defense 8
Agriculture and Forestry 13
Arts and Entertainment 101
Associations 54
Automotive 20
Biotechnology and Pharmaceuticals 13
Business 36
Business and Society 16
Business Law 15
Business Services 41
Business Travel 13
Chemicals 1
Classifieds 1
Construction and Maintenance 24
Consumer Goods and Services 30
Cooperatives 7
Customer Service 19
Dictionaries 4
Directories 8
E-Commerce 28
Education 60
Education and Training 203
Electronics and Electrical 15
Employment 7
Energy and Environment 22
Environmental 30
Financial Services 20
Food and Related Products 24
Government 185
Healthcare 67
History 7
Hospitality 14
Human Resources 14
Industrial Goods and Services 20
Information Services 30
Information Technology 61
International Business and Trade 16
Investing 6
Libraries 13
Major Companies 16
Management 14
Marketing and Advertising 39
Materials 10
Military 7
Mining and Drilling 2
News and Media 42
Non-profits 258
Opportunities 1
Publishing and Printing 20
Real Estate 21
Regional 40
Resources 3
Retail Trade 15
Science 57
Small Business 36
Software 41
Telecommunications 10
Textiles and Nonwovens 3
Transportation and Logistics 12
Wholesale Trade 7

The big winners are non-profits (258), education & training (203), government (185), and arts & entertainment (101). Rounding out the top ten are healthcare (67), IT (60), science (57), associations (54), and new & media (42).

Its interesting that both non-profits (often non-governmental organizations) and government rank high. Also note that if one combines education & training with education, their total (263) exceeds even non-profits.

The total of 1925 does not equal the 1480 sites listed on Plone.net. That's because entries can choose to be associated with more than one industry. On average, each site is associated with 1.3 categories.

One final statistic--I ran the numbers for a frequency distribution, the number of industry categories that have a count within a given range.

Range Number of industries
0-25 41
26-50 11
51-75 5
76-100 0
101-125 1
126-150 0
151-175 0
176-200 1
201-225 1
226-250 0
251-275 1

Graphically displayed, this shows that there are very few categories with large numbers of sites and numerous categories with just a handful of sites. This, I believe, is an example of the "long tail" phenomenon. More on that in another post, but its probably key to a part of Plone's success.

3 comments:

Roberto Allende said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Roberto Allende said...

Great Job!

Kind Regards
R. Allende

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