@FIRST_LIGHT

I’ve posted a version 1.0 of a Drupal Economics Indicators page on this site. The page contains links to live charts pulling data from various web sources that provide data on the relative economic health of the Drupal economy.

From time to time, I’ll blog my interpretation of the data I see in the charts. Here are my current observations:

• Search traffic for Drupal is strong and growing. Yay!
• Blog posts are steady, but traffic is really low. Drupalcon really seemed to shut down the Drupal blogosphere. We need more bloggers to raise our profile.
• Drupal.org traffic reach is strong relative to other projects out there, but not growing as much as I would like.
• Drupal mentions in job postings look really strong relative to other social publishing technologies. But there still aren’t as many postings as I would like to see. If you dig into the data, only hundreds of job postings actually mention Drupal whereas thousands of job postings mention PHP. But at least Drupal is a specific skill that people are willing to pay for.
• Web dev jobs for a variety of technologies generally seem to be in a decline phase, probably due to the general recession. However, PHP jobs seems to be holding up a little better than ASP and Java.
• Jobs that mention Drupal do not seem to pay as well as Java and Flash/Flex jobs. I keep hearing that Drupal developers are impossible to find. If so, then people should be asking for more money to re-calibrate supply and demand. Getting Drupal attached to more high value projects and having developer certification may help boost salaries as well.
• The top Drupal book is selling better than the top Joomla book, but not nearly as well as the top Wordpress book. Wordpress is a very different beast though, so it’s not surprising.

What do YOU see in the data? Is this helpful for the Drupal community? How can we make it better?

NOTE: I realize that there is plenty of other fragmentary and anecdotal data that I could put on the page. However, I am not sure I would be able to keep it updated. So for now, I am choosing to only publish data that is live, meaning that there is a mashable web service that provides current data. If you are aware of interesting live data sources that I haven’t included, please add a comment and I’ll check it out. I am really hoping that the Drupal Association will some day provide easily mashable data from Drupal.org (downloads, registered user counts, forum post traffic, core check-ins, new module check-ins, etc.).

Here’s a link to a snapshot of the data on the day this post was published.