My Senior Project is coming up in a couple months, and my partner and I were discussing which language/framework combination to use...
Since the idea is to conceptualize and complete an entire "real-world" project from beginning to end, we wanted to use technologies that are prevalent in the real-world. The thing is, everyone has different opinions on which way to go and who's using what. It's tough to get an unbiased opinion, since everyone is used to using what they regularly use and are hesitant to suggest something else.
Anyway, this conversation led me to the (so I thought) brilliant idea of compiling a list of sites I use daily, plus the top 10 sites on Alexa, and then list all the techs those sites use. Whichever language/framework is listed most often, that was the one we were going to go with.
Unfortunately, I took for granted that this information was going to be readily accessible.
Edit: I think we're just going to go with Ruby/Rails. PHP/Cake and Python/Django are also on the table, but Ruby excites me more for some reason (and I get the impression they're all fairly transferable, in terms of skillsets). We're learning C#/.NET in class, so that would be the easy way, but I just can't help but wonder how many companies are running IIS instead of Apache.