An interesting, if lite, study of language use, or rather extrapolation of language use, has been posted to Usenet comp.lang.* Traffic Evolution.
In essence, the author mined groups.google for postings for particular language references (perl, cobol, etc). An interesting experiment. Could it be extended to Google's other interfaces? Larry Wall has used similar information derived from job boards in the past. How do all these match up?
As always, more questions than answers.
[note: edited to add link to Wall's State of the Onion]
Posted by esinclai at May 14, 2002 06:58 PM |
once I saw a density map of usenet that was a pixel-by-pixel imagemap; red areas were busy groups, and yellow or white areas were moribund. Clicking would launch an nntp URL.
I was a long, long time ago, and I have no idea where I saw it.
Posted by: mike on May 16, 2002 08:16 PM