I've been asked to find out among other things what kinds of Internet bulletin boards are most used by young people and what proportion of young people visit them. I thought this kind of thing would be fairly easy to find out - after all bulletin boards/message boards/usenet were among the most studied forms of Internet use in the early days. But I am finding it surprisingly difficult to get this information as current surveys like the Pew and OxIS ones don't seem to track bulletin board use or virtual community participation at all (except insofar as it might be included in uses like "seeking sport information"). Is it because kids these days are all just using IM and writing Xanga blogs or do we only think this because we don't ask them about this kind of use any more? Can anyone help with my statistical questions? And more generally does anyone else agree that as we keep chasing each new phenomenon (file sharing, IM, blogging, social network software) we risk losing track altogether of still extant and important practices (affinity group message board or mailing list use for example - or MUD use?) If these uses are indeed being displaced by other uses shouldn't we at least have a crack at measuring them so we can be sure they are gone so we can chart their decline as well as their rise? --- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone)