Save the State of the Cloud!
June 2nd, 2010 | Published in General | 6 Comments
We interrupt our regular programming for the following update.
Unfortunately, this month we have no regular post in the State of the Cloud series. Quantcast’s Top 1M Site list, which is the input data set used by the research, is broken. Instead of 1 million sites, the list contains only 78,000. Clearly, this makes it difficult to continue tracking using the same, consistent methodology we’ve had in place for almost a year.
Quantcast are aware of the problem, but “do not have an ETA on the fix”.
What you can do
Help us prioritize Quantcast’s investigation of this issue: go to http://www.quantcast.com/contact and tell Quantcast what you think. Here’s an example of what you could write:
Message:
Dear Quantcast team,
As a regular reader of the popular JackOfAllClouds.com blog, I was dismayed to hear that due to a malfunction in Quantcast’s Top 1M Site List, the blog is unable to publish its monthly analysis of the cloud computing industry. As this research is an essential source of data on the entire cloud industry, I kindly ask you to urgently look into this issue.
June 3rd, 2010 at 12:52 am (#)
Alexa seems also providing free download of the top 1M sites (though apparently through different methodology). Hope it’s useful.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip
June 3rd, 2010 at 12:58 am (#)
@Ang Li – indeed Alexa do this, and by pure coincidence I did run the data set for Alexa this month as I thought to compare the two results. (In retrospect, Alexa may have been be a better choice as their data is more global in nature.)
Unfortunately, as you noted, comparing cloud percentages from Quantcast and Alexa would be apples and oranges and it would be hard to infer any trends over the past year. We’d really be starting from scratch.
June 3rd, 2010 at 12:59 am (#)
Forgot to mention this in the post, but credit to the super-cloud-expert Shlomo Swidler for suggesting we mobilize the readership to help put this on Quantcast’s agenda.
June 3rd, 2010 at 1:05 am (#)
@Guy Rosen That I totally understand. Hope Quantcast can recover soon, as I really enjoy this series of work :)
June 3rd, 2010 at 1:23 am (#)
Message sent! Keep up the good work, Guy.
June 3rd, 2010 at 1:37 am (#)
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Guy Rosen and Paul Burns, Roi Tiger. Roi Tiger said: RT @guyro: Save the State of the Cloud: a #CloudComputing call to action. Please act and RT — http://bit.ly/cY0yTp [...]