Dear all, "Karim R. Lakhani" wrote: (...)
- there are also practicalities to consider. a low GINI number in a list serv may mean that there is just a ton of noise. imagine being on a list where every one wanted to chime in and give their $0.02. it would get pretty noisy, pretty fast. and maybe not very effective.
As I read this post, I remembered having read that a number of people have been working on power law theories describing generally the distribution of links in a network, i.e. a rather uneven dsitribution, with many nodes having small numbers of edges, and a very few having very large numbers of edges connected to them. Thinking of Usenet discussions as networks (nodes=actors, edges=messages), one would expect the distribution of messages/authors to follow such a power law. (Interestingly, physicists relate the occurence of power law-like distributions to the phenomenon of self-organisation, confirming the consideration by Karim.) Now, I was wondering whether anybody has thought about analyzing the distributions of messages in newsgroups etc. in such a way to find out about the type of distribution? Until now, I only know of some Gini/Lorenz-curve analyses. Greetings, Steffen --------------------------- Steffen Albrecht TU Hamburg-Harburg AB 1-11 Schwarzenbergstr. 95 21071 Hamburg Germany Tel. +49 40 42878-3680 Fax: +49 40 42878-2635 eMail: steffen.albrecht@tuhh.de www: http://www.tu-harburg.de/tbg