Is this the content you want from X.com?

I recently wrote a two part series of technical articles for X.com on “Divining DevZone Insight from Filtered Feeds and Deep Pages” (read part 1 and/or part 2 by clicking the link for one or both).  These articles showed you how to use Yahoo Pipes and YQL along with some Python to pull data down from various RSS feeds, manipulate it to filter out the feed item details, and then use those details to rank key content topics.  If you missed either article I would encourage you to go back and read them from the links above.

What I want to do here is get your comments, please, on whether the content we’re writing is in line with what you want from X.com.  Please take this as an opportunity to tell us how we’re doing.

Let’s look at the results from the harvest+analysis articles.  I generated several charts showing the number of topic mentions across the content we wrote for the DevZone, blog posts as well as articles and book excerpts, from the launch in July 2010 through 7 February 2011.  Here’s a high level view of the number of mentions of all seventy topics that were analyzed (labels turned off so the general trend isn’t obstructed by clutter; they are turned on when we zoom in in subsequent charts):

We’ve been making a concerted effort to provide a lot of DevZone coverage of ‘mobile’ topics (the topic with the most mentions above), and it shows.  Zooming in on the top twenty topics you see that in fact quite a few are mobile related:

Based upon separate hit analyses conducted by Travis Robertson and myself, mobile content is exactly what you are looking for.  But if we’re wrong on that, please tell us what you would prefer by leaving a comment below.

Now let’s look at the particular mobile related topics we’ve been covering so far:

The bars above again shows per-item mentions of each topic across all DevZone blog posts, articles, and book excerpts from the DevZone’s inception through the cut-off date last week, almost seven months total.  Taking the ‘mobile’ bar as an overall indicator we see that a bit more than half of the mobile related content discussed Android.  A similar amount of iPhone + iOS + iPad mentions were made, though they often ooccured in the same items so the overall concentration was on Android versus “i”-content.

Is that the right balance?  Or would you like to see more “i”-coverage in our material?

I’m also curious to hear your take on our mobile wallet, QR code, and NFC coverage.  Too little, too much, or just right?

Please click here to read the full post on the PayPal X Developer Network including additional PayPal and programming language analyses. You can also leave your comments on that post.