After my post yesterday on summer’s slowdown, I got curious about what the Boston start-up community was talking about.  I went back to Pinyadda’s index and identified the most popular words in article titles.  Chart 1 displays the 20 most popular words and their frequency over the summer of 2010 (side note: there were 3385 total Boston start-up articles during this time frame)

Chart 1 – Popular words

Some thoughts:

• ‘Marketing’ was pretty high on this list.  Brian Halligan of HubSpot might be correct when he claimed “… Madison Avenue is to marketing over the last 50 years as Boston is to marketing over the next 50 years.” (Bostinnovation article)
• ‘Drugs’ making the top 20 was originally surprising but MassHighTech produced over 40 articles this summer pertaining to pharmaceutical drugs

Which companies and organizations were most popular?  Chart 2 displays the 10 most.

Chart 2 – Popular Organizations

I think Chart 2 is pretty indicative of the Boston ecosystem in general.  Represented in Chart 2 are biotech companies, an educational institution and a couple of cool internet-based start-ups, which would be a fairly accurate description of Boston’s scene.

Thoughts:

• Although not strictly Boston-based, you’d be hard-pressed to find people not writing about Google, Facebook or Twitter anywhere in the world.
• Apple was number 11 on the list while Harvard came in with a frequency value of 5.

How do you feel about this data? Is it surprising to see Google, Facebook and Twitter atop the list?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 7:46 am and is filed under Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.