The Web And Its Heroes

I fell into a pretty deep rabbit hole today! Being silly, I had this idea that there sure are a lot of web developers and isn’t that funny since these days there are only a couple of web sites left. Very droll, eh?

But seriously… The BLS says there are 162,900 web developers sharing the blame. And just how many web sites are left anyway? I discovered Quantcast’s rankings of website popularity. I’m not endorsing it or saying it’s completely accurate, but it definitely is interesting. They even have a data set of the top 1 million web sites that you can download. (Of course it only contains 527614 but let’s not quibble with free data.)

Here are the top 50 web sites according to Quantcast which makes for an interesting reality check.

I’m not sure exactly what "Hidden profile" indicates (pr0n?). There’s nothing too shocking on that list really except adobe.com at lucky 13. How can they still be in business, never mind a hot web property? Yuck! And that quora.com is pretty awful too. Otherwise I’m not shocked by this list.

Pulling the monthly distinct user counts from their web listing, I made this demonstration of a perfect example of a mathematical phenomenon known as the power law.

(Do you like how I included internet kittehs?)

This list is full of interesting information. Here are the top 25 .edu sites shown with their overall rank.

I’m pretty impressed that UCSD makes the list. Here are a couple of other interesting (for personal reasons) edu sites farther down the list.

How does on-line education compare? Here’s where these on-line education sites rank overall.

In honor of Militarism Glorification Day I had a look at .mil sites.

I actually didn’t even know what osd.mil was and that as a URL goes nowhere. It’s actually "Office of the Secretary of Defense" and has tricksy URLs like this. I have no idea what happened to army.mil which is definitely a real thing. It’s not even on the list at all. Maybe they use internet camouflage. There were these.

But the interesting thing to note is that there are around 10 mil sites in the top 10000 list. I think if we plotted ritual adulation of various government organizational units, we’d see another clear power law law with the military grabbing all the glory.

What about all the people serving their country peacefully? This list provides a pretty interesting look at what our tax dollars are buying. Here are the top 100 .gov web sites; these all make the top 10000 overall list.

(I manually removed local websites ending in .gov e.g. virginia.gov. I’m sure they’re doing important things too but I wanted to focus on the national level.) I found this list quite interesting and full of insights. For example, I’m reminded how creepy SSS.gov is; why not just call it Waffen-SSS? Seriously, that would actually fit those guys.

But that’s an exception. A lot of these sites are quite uplifting. I was encouraged to see the NIH so high up. Hey, they are definitely helping me to fight the good fight on behalf of real Americans against the shady side of big pharma. People laud the courage of soldiers and that’s fine, but let’s take a moment to consider the CDC. If we’re going to talk about making Americans secure, we’d better say some good things about the CDC. I recently was in a high security medical research vivarium and the intense safety protocols remind one that if you want a job where dying a gruesome death is possible, the military isn’t the only way to go. But if you do the job well, you can maybe prevent a pandemic from killing half of humanity.

In the mainstream media’s desperate quest for lurid sensationalism you don’t hear about little things like the Thrift Savings Plan (whatever that is) helping victims of the California wildfires. Or that the SEC is righteously punching back at some pharma scumbags. Do you like having electricity? Apparently the EIA is helping by obsessively worrying about that so you don’t have to. Yea! And there are so many things on this list that are real treasures. For example, the National Park Service. Also the USGS has been a go to resource for maps and tons of other important things long before the internet existed. Same with NOAA and it’s pal weather.gov. And at 624, NASA is a not just an internet rock star; it is the team that scored some of humanity’s most stunning achievements.

And this is just the popular stuff. There are tons of things farther down the list buried in undeserved obscurity. For example, at 13785 is the National Gallery of Art and 10064, the National Endowment for the Humanities. Why is time.gov only 10213?

In closing I’ll also mention my favorite government heroes. Some people have that urge to see the world and meet interesting people but are heroically squeamish about killing them willy-nilly. I suspect that The Peace Corps web site would be more popular (than 14528th) if they weren’t systematically sent to the places in the world least likely to have good wifi. So bravo and thanks to the Peace Corps volunteers who sacrifice so much to show the world that not all Americans are assholes.