Rob Harwood spotted this very interesting trend from Alexa describing the rise of Ruby reach as Rails enters the scene:

Harwood interprets the correlation:

Forget the hype over Rails — not important. Forget the anti-hype too — irrelevant. Instead, just look at this graph from Alexa.com. See any correlation? Rails is a killer app, regardless of hype or anti-hype. As soon as Rails appeared on the scene, Ruby has experienced a 200% increase in web traffic over three months.