At long last, I have gotten quite a bit of the Brin-L traffic into my database that looks for patterns in discussions. Up to now, I have only used this to analyze stock market discussions. I did this by capturing the header info from the Yahoo Group pages. That gave me about 60,000 records. Note that I'm not looking at message bodies, just who posted, the subject and when. In any event, the bodies for the vast majority of these messages don't seem to be available on Yahoo anyway. You may note that Yahoo Groups shows 79K messages. The missing ones are just that, missing. In the stock boards, that means someone deleted them. Don't know what it means for Brin-L.
Some early results... We've had about 490 people posting (minus some whose names changed along the way, making life more difficult for statistical analysis, dammit) and about 15,000 subjects in 60,396 messages (minus the ones that Yahoo deleted). Without benefit of a computer or calculator, it appears that the average thread length is four messages. Top posters (out of 490 total): Julia Thompson 2,656 (1,601 subjects, or about 1.6 messages per subject) Gord Sellar 2,491 (1,397 subjects, 1.8 mps) JDG 2,196 (1,382 subjects, 1.6 mps) Charlie Bell 1,965 (1,130, 1.7 mps) Alberto Monteiro 1,912 (1,156, 1.6 mps) Nicola Gebendinger: 1,433 (650, 2.2 mps) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1,414 (621, 2.3 mps) Steve Sloan 1,341 (946, 1.4 mps) Ronn Blankenship 1,293 (735, 1.8 mps) J. van Baardwijk 1,226 (715, 1.7 mps) Mean (average) number of postings = 123.5 Standard deviation = 318.5 ... which I suppose indicates that quite a few of us are truly deviant. JDG, you are SIX POINT FIVE standard deviations from the mean! On a personal note, I came in at #20 with 887 (2.4 standard deviations from the mean) and 1.6 mps. David Brin is #71 with 212 and 1.0 mps. Some of the folks who are around the mean number of postings: Adam Lipscomb, TursiopsAmicus, some fella called "Bemmzim," who I suspect is using two names, SeJ, Gary Nunn and Illana Halupovich, whose momentum will soon carry her far from it. Longest threads: Tragedy in Israel 277 messages (started by Robert Seeberger 12/1/01) Denver massacre 225 (Hector Yee, 4/22/99) Chivalry 224 (started by Charlie Bell, 5/24/99) I l*ove y*u v*rus: 182 (started by Marvin Long 5/4/2000) Why me? Chocolate and Beer! 163 (Started by S.V. van Baardwijk-Holten, 11/17/99) The Liberal/Conservative Creed 154 (Started by Eythain Lazh, 5/23/1998) An invitation to lurkers of the 3rd kind 154 (started by d.brin 8/21/1999) Free will? 149 (started by Ticia, 9/18/1998) Authority of the Marketplace 149 (started by me, 7/16/2001) The mean number of messages in a thread is 4.02, with a standard deviation of 9.56. Our threads are terribly deviant, too. Okay, keep back you statisticians. None of this is meant to be particularly meaningful... yet. All of this is based on postings since 3/29/1998. Going off to see what POTUS has to say. I'll have some more analysis, things like identifying who tends to get discussion going, later on. Feel free to ask questions or make suggestions for analysis. Nick
