Katerina, Interesting and very relevant question. As people have suggested it will depend on the format of your data: - web based discussion board - usenet - email - email to web archive all of those will require different tools for you to pull out the data you care about. If it is web based - you may want to ask the organization to give you access to the database that has this information - thus you will avoid doing a whole lot of cutting and pasting from the web to your analysis tool (probably excel). If it is maillist based - you may be able to get access to the archives - there will be specific headers you can mine to get the information you need. In any case becoming friends with a good PERL programmer is a good idea. PERL is a great language for text and data munging and often what appear to be HUGE tasks for us non-programmers can be fairly trivial for them. Look up a local PERL newsgroup in Greece and see if they can point you to the right people (they tend to be fairly friendly). As you mentioned, you will most definitely find a power-law relationship in posting patterns - this should not be news - i guess you need to perhaps explain why this is the case. You may also want to examine if the frequent posters are initiating or responding to threads - in my research on open source projects - frequent posters are always responding and rarely initiate. Here are two examples of papers where I did some similar analysis: This one looks at user-to-user technical support on Usenet for Apache web server: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lakhanivonhippelusersupport.pdf This one looks at how people join and specialize in an open source project: http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/rp-vonkroghspaethlakhani.pdf hth, K -- =============================================== Karim R. Lakhani MIT Sloan School of Management & The Boston Consulting Group, Strategy Practice Initiative e-mail: karim.lakhani@sloan.mit.edu | lakhani.karim@bcg.com voice: 617-851-1224 fax: 617-344-0403 http://spoudaiospaizen.net/ http://opensource.mit.edu | http://freesoftware.mit.edu http://userinnovation.mit.edu