Luke Ashe-Browne

Just a fun post today:

So a few days ago I ditched the last.fm plugin for the side bar seeing as they are no-longer any use to me. Lo-and behold, the huge delay to get the footer loaded is gone, dang non asynchronous external domain requests. Generally this site could use some attention anyway, maybe I’ll try that Square Space thing, or just update wordpress to something from within the last 5 years, or maybe post once in a while, yeh that one sounds good.

Otherwise, I came across a facinating little piece of statistical minutiae that sang to my OCD need to know about and understand the internet and universe around me.

On Three Black Dots weblog, the observation wasmade that the google search term trends around “Ubuntu” and “Windows 7″, show that ubuntu has some sticking power against the might of the microsoft marketing machine.

Besides this view, I took the liberty of testing the trends of a few more key words.

“Linux” vs “Windows7″:

The trend of linux against windows 7 is fair enough, but it is not so encouraging to see the slow and steady decline in the search term “linux”, though the argument could be made that now people are more aware of the brands within the linux world, identifying such things as Ubuntu and fedora, and so here’s the graph for that comparison

“Fedora” vs “Windows 7″:

This enlightening set of metrics shows the power microsoft has in comparison to the pull of the linux movement. though added together this shows the cumulative strength of mindshare attained by linux and some of the main distribution names, still exceeds that of Windows 7.

But what of the lesser distributions, doing a quick test query, I find the same decline, while this may be attributed to  the natural decline in it’s popularity as it is supplanted by the present powerhouse distributions, it is evident that more people are searching for a “white shirt”than are looking for Mepis.

“White shirt” vs “Mepis”:

I’d like to credit Om Malik of GigaOm for the idea to use “white shirt”, on the twit podcast this was a remarkable chance suggestion he made for a search term to test the comparable effectiveness of search engines, when discussing Bing, Google and Cuil. Just a funny segment I enjoyed.