hey kids.

i'm unemployed and bored.

with all the talk about dotcom booms and people moving away and all these really general statements people are making; i was curious as to what's really going on now, what went on four years ago and what effect did the boom really have on this community.

so.. i wrote a script that went through the craigslist archive on egroups and tallied the number of postings each day for each category then i stuffed it in a database and made a grapher tool.

it's kinda neat cos you can basically see some somwhat hard data on what the san francisco bay area has been doing over the past four years. you can graph job postings from various industries against things like apartments for rent or housing wanted postings, also for sale postings and resumes.

some of the interesting things i found is that the number of housing wanted postings seems to be slightly down recently but pretty much unaffected by the drop in jobs. perhaps people are always in a state of wanting to move to a city.

(unfortunately, personal listings aren't archived. i guess that's a good thing... but i guess it also would have been cool to graph activity on the personals categories against some of the categories that reflect the general state of the economy. (maybe when people aren't tied up in career they start to think about more important things, or maybe not...) )

either way, the data is there, you can look at it for different time periods and categories. draw your own conclusions and have fun!

the url is here:

http://www.signal11.com/~adam/craigslist/chart-o-matic.cgi

take it easy..

--adam



Other ways to contact poster:
awful self promotion: if you're a nonprofit (social or arts film/video would be awesome) or socially responsible business looking for someone with tech skills. (or someone who is bright and eager to learn) gimme a shout at the email listed above.