Introducing the Mortensen technology popularity index (Edit Overflow)

The Mortensen technology popularity index (MTPI) is equating the number of times some technology is misspelt with its popularity, that is, how many are actually using the technology and misspelling it when mentioning it on the Internet is taken as a proxy for its popularity. It is based on misspellings recorded in Edit Overflow‘s wordlist. Note: It is the number of different misspellings, not the actual frequency (but it is assumed to correlate fairly well). For example, JavaScript is very often misspelt Javascript, so JavaScript is probably undercounted in this index.

There is of course a huge selection bias and other biases with this index, but it does give an indication.

If this index was computed on past versions of the Edit Overflow word list, trends could probably be spotted.

The index

As of 2023-04-24, the 50 most popular technologies (by this index) are:

Here is the list for the #1, Raspberry Pi.