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Thursday, October 15, 2009

The Web 2.0 of Metaphors

So you think you can dance by fofurasfelinas from flickr (CC-NC-ND)After hearing that something is Wikipedia of whatever it is about, and getting slightly annoyed by it, I decided, in interest of science, to compile popularity ranking of "the X of Y" metaphors, by Google counting.

I found quite a few false positives, like "the livejournal of Nikki", and "the Linux of your choice", but upholding the glorious scientific tradition of ignoring every methodological issue that cannot be fixed, I completely disregarded them.

  • "the windows of" - 15,100,000
  • "the internet of" - 7,790,000
  • "the apple of" - 6,470,000
  • "the google of" - 3,160,000
  • "the youtube of" - 766,000
  • "the microsoft of" - 397,000
  • "the imdb of" - 307,000
  • "the craigslist of" - 303,000
  • "the livejournal of" - 290,000
  • "the ebay of" - 277,000
  • "the amazon of" - 262,000
  • "the facebook of" - 237,000
  • "the myspace of" - 235,000
  • "the linux of" - 197,000
  • "the wikipedia of" - 180,000
  • "the yahoo of" - 142,000
  • "the flickr of" - 124,000
  • "the ibm of" - 109,000
  • "the blogspot of" - 108,000
  • "the web 2.0 of" - 92,900
  • "the bing of" - 90,900
  • "the firefox of" - 63,200
  • "the aol of" - 63,100
  • "the napster of" - 61,200
  • "the msn of" - 52,100
  • "the digg of" - 23,600

It seems the most popular activity is explaining one web service as metaphor of another:

  • Is Craigslist the "Napster" of the Sex Industry
  • YouTube Redesign: Becoming the Google of Video?
  • Is Facebook: the Google of Social Networks
  • Google Earth Is the AOL of the Geoweb
  • MySpace is the AOL of Social Media/Web 2.0
  • YouTube.com — the Flickr of Video

There are also some unusual finds:

  • The Wikipedia of Slutty Dressing
  • The Craigslist of Antibiotic Resistance
  • Is Python the Apple of Programming Languages?

Another interesting find is that while I've been expecting a lot of "the X of sex", only Wikipedia (36,200) and Facebook (29,500) have decent number of matches.

"The X of porn" is a lot more popular, here Google (378,000), YouTube (354,000), and surprisingly Napster (22,200) are taking the lead.

The other most popular Internet activity, spam, got almost no hits.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hope you realize "the windows of" and "the apple of" are parts of phrases and statements that are pretty common.. Skewed data.

taw said...

I'm very well aware of it, and as I said - because there's nothing I can do to fix the data, I'm going to ignore the problem.

That's well-established methodology of science.

Anonymous said...

@ anonymous

i hope you realize you didn't read the first paragraph