One thing I’ve noticed is that Perl people don’t tend to use “perl” as a tag in their blog posts. I know that Perl Buzz doesn’t, typically, because all our posts are about Perl and it’s not a useful distinction for us… but perhaps we should anyway? Over on use.perl.org the platform doesn’t support tags at all. Between the two of those, that could count for 50-100 posts a day, I suspect.

Another thing, just looking at the ruby posts, is that many of them aren’t about the programming language at all. From the first page, as I look at it right now, I see: “this is a blog with a Ruby Gloom layout”, “diamond and ruby studded shoes”, “meet the great ruby dog”, “due splendide cavalier ruby”, “Rolling Stones ‘Ruby Tuesday’”, “Ruby and I did our last weeks ironing”, “amichette cavalier ruby”, “to find that Ruby had tipped over”, something in Spanish about the Smashing Pumpkins, a gemstone spam blog, http://community.webshots.com/user/RubyAmelia , and “ruby, sapphire and diamond encrusted Rene Caovilla sandal”.

In fact, on the front page only 4 posts were about the programming language, 2 were in Asian languages I can’t even start to read and might have been about the language, and 14 weren’t about programming at all.

Compare the Perl list: at least 13/20 were actually about Perl (in fact some were duplicates with the Ruby list, where people said things like “Perl, Python, and Ruby”).

If you change the search to be “perl programming” and “ruby programming” you’ll see that we’re running more or less neck-and-neck since August 11th, when is when Schwern triggered the perl blogging push and I really started running with it.