I've been a regular attendee of the Web Innovators meetup in Boston/Cambridge for a long time. I can remember way back when all the attendees (less than 50) would fit into a bar. I remember when Reddit presented for the first time in public.
The group has grown considerably since then. There's a meeting coming up this Tuesday (Jan 29, 2008) for which there are already 650+ people *registered*. Of course, not all of them are likely to make it, but that's still a pretty big number.
Since I have some reasonably structured data from the RSS feed of the attendee list, I thought I'd take a quick peek at some of the data. I figured if I'm interested, others would be too:
Here's a quick idea of how many of the attendees match certain search terms (there are 659 right now).
Note: This "data" (and I use the term very, very loosely) is for amusement value only. Resist the temptation to criticize me for this frivolous and unscientific approach.
Search Term (and number of matching results):
1. Developer: 13 (This number is way too small).
2. Programmer: 1
3. Investor: 0
4. Venture: 39 (!)
5. Startup: 3
6. Mobile: 8
7. Blog: 162 (Lots of people with links to blogs. Great to see)
8. MIT: 22 (Yay, MIT!)
9. Harvard: 20 (Harvard's not far behind).
10. Babson: 1
11. Marketing: 33 (Lots of marketing. I'm surprised).
12. Sales: 11 (Even sales is getting into the startup game).
13. Finance: 2
14. Architect: 14 (More architects than developers. Who's building all the great software?)
If you're ambitious, and want to take a more programmatic approach to this, I'm going to offer a small bounty of $200 (payable via PayPal) to the first person reading this article that can develop a simple PHP script that does the following:
1. Can be invoked via a query string parameter named "feedurl" (passing in an RSS feed URL)
2. Retrieve the contents of the feed and parse all data into tokens.
3. Output a simple HTML table which shows all "tokens" found in the various elements in the feed, in descending order by hit count.
For test data, you can use the feed I used for the above brute-force analysis:
http://www.eventbrite.com/rss/event_list_attendees/83726428
Rules: Void where prohibited, no purchase necessary, only one winner, and I get to decide what's considered "working". Email a working, public URL where I can test the script to dshah [@] onstartups.com. If you're the winner, I'll post a notice as a comment on this thread. If you win, I agree to send you the $200 to a PayPal address of your choosing and you agree to send me the code (so I can make it available to others or use it for whatever purposes I choose). Deadline is 11:59:59 Eastern Time today (Jan 27, 2008). If nobody participates, no harm done.
Please, no questions allowed. It's a trivial dollar amount and it's supposed to be fun. Just use your judgement. If I had time to clarify the rules further and answer questions, I'd write the script myself (smile).
Note: If you're working for HubSpot, you're ineligible. Give someone else a chance to make some quick cash.
Hope to see you at the Web Innovator's meeting. If you're an OnStartups.com reader and end up attending, please come up and say Hi. I'll be the introverted Indian guy that's trying really hard to avoid making eye contact with people he doesn't know.