At 13:32 5-2-02 -0800, Nick Arnett wrote:

> > How do you make such an analysis? The first thing that comes to mind is
> > going through all the messages one by one, and creating a table of who
> > replied to whom. But with very active communities, certainly when those
> > communities also have a large number of members, that method would take
> > forever and a day.
>
>True.  It's called link analysis and it is often used in law enforcement,
>but with a much, much smaller community (of criminals, usually).

Since you seem to know a lot (definitely more than I do) about link 
analysis and analysing the dynamics of on-line communities, can you 
recommend some good reading material on this topic? Something that does not 
require a college education to comprehend?


>I keep thinking there's a way to exclude the one-message threads easily, but
>it is eluding me.  I guess it would be a join between my threads table and a
>table generated with a query that gets distinct subjects.

A one-message thread would have a subject header like "This Is The 
Subject", but there would not be any messages with the subject header "Re: 
This Is The Subject". So, a filter would (in pseudo code) look something like:

EXCLUDE IF
   EXIST "Subject"
   AND NOT EXIST "Re: Subject"

Just theorising here...


>That probably isn't clear unless you speak SQL...

Sorry, me no speaky the SQL very good. (I know a bit about it as it comes 
with my attempt to get my CompSci degree.)


Jeroen

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