Tim O’Reilly reports that according to Nielsen Bookscan, sales of Ruby books have passed sales of Perl books.

It should be noted that sales of Ruby on Rails books is counted along with Ruby and also that these sails are “driven by recency”, and sales of Perl could spike when Perl 6 comes out.

This is interesting news nonetheless.

PHP still rules the roost under the web’s hood, so to speak, but Ruby is now definitely more than a lightweight contender.

I was compelled to buy the Independent newspaper today, only because the front page illustration was so clever.

A graphical representation of such facts can be very compelling and carry a strong message.

Speaking of graphical representations: A book recently added to my Amazon wish list is Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. I’m already so enthralled by the sparklines idea that I’m tempted to put them into any web application I’m working on regardless of functionality.

I won’t though, as this would be very non-Tuftian.

Some books you have to buy, others you have to have stuffed down your throat by friends. One such friend who is a business student at Reykjavik University recently sent me one of his favorites: The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

He assured me that even if the cover is ugly, the content is good.

The book’s introduction gives its geographical origins away:

What is branding? From a business point of view, branding in the marketplace is very similar to branding on the ranch.

Branding on the ranch?

All jokes aside, the book is quite interesting. One of its themes is that a brand’s scope effects its impact. A strong brand has a narrow focus. Broadening the base of a brand and widening its appeal may yield a short term increase in sales but on the long term it often undermines the brand and decrease sales.

This theory is interesting in the Rails vs. Java debate. It certainly seems that 37signals and the Rails team have grasped the concept of the power of a narrow focus when it comes to “branding” Ruby on Rails (see: Are you sure you want to be mainstream? and Distinguishing power from versatility).

It seems that the “laws of branding” apply as much in the market for programming languages as they do in retail.

This week the Belgian born jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt would have turned 96. Reinhardt was a pioneer of the “gypsy jazz” genre and according to a recent program on the BBC World Service, gypsy jazz has seen a considerable revival the past ten years. This is in part due to the fact that with the Internet, its followers can communicate more easily between themselves and spread the word to others.

The rise in popularity of gypsy jazz represents the cultural aspect of Chris Anderson’s Long Tail. The long tail as put forth by Anderson is primarily an effect the decreased cost of communications and distribution has on business. Or as Wikipedia puts it:

products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters

That is not the whole story, though. The long tail effect is often accompanied by positive feedback. As more people buy a product, more people hear about it, buy it and so on until a possible “tipping point” style epidemic effect means that the long tail produces a blockbuster.

While we’re on the subject, fans of gypsy jazz should check out the Quecum Bar in London or sample Django’s material on the excellent Last.fm.

Chris Anderson, who originally coined the term “long tail“, has a book coming out this year. According to his blog he has finished the manuscript and The Guardian newspaper has it on its “must read” list of 2006.

[The Long Tail is] supposedly the natural successor to the “tipping point” in the field of big business ideas…

And on the subject of the long tail distribution. The blog search engine Technorati tracks about 25.4 million websites. Assuming most of them are blogs, the long tail really stares you in the face when a new blog such as this one is registered on the site:

Technorati Rank: 1,088,376 (0 links from 0 sites)

Presumably, this means that of the sites being tracked, only 1 in 25 has an incoming link. Jason Kottke analyzed the long tail distribution of Technorati’s top 100 - this is the other end of it.