Yes, well, these issues are perplexing, but not insurmountable. I'm sure the early scientists who wondered why trees burn but (some) rocks don't thought they had a similar problem on their hands ... Maths can help with anything that can be quantified - strength of relationships, passion of the content, capacity for "leakage" of involvement (the extent to which participants have a choice of fora) even "importance to our lives" can be quantified ... it's a matter of coming up with imaginative and reproduceable metrics, crunching the numbers and seeing whether anything useful emerges. I read this morning (http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/technology/s/231/231348_technolo...) about some people at Edinburgh who say they can replace DJs with a digital agent to construct playlists tailored to your taste. I'd love to see the maths behind that. No doubt it's a little primitive, but I also read yesterday (http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2006/12/20/the-man-from-goog...) that Google can predict, based on seach data, the gross takings of a movie with 82% accuracy - six weeks before its release! And no doubt they'll get more accurate with refinement. The numbers can tell all sorts of stories if we begin to explore them - we're just blinded by the size of the task and the lack of obvious metrics. Incidentally, a quick peruse of the groups in Myspace shows a similar pattern to the one you observe in Yahoo! groups and as has been reported concerning blog activity. Very Long Tail, all of them ... but wait - that's a mathematical relationship! Cheers, Hughie ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mary-Helen Ward" <mhward@usyd.edu.au> To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic@ozemail.com.au> Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 11:01 AM Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?
I realise that email lists seem a bit 'old hat', but I think that there is a lot to be learned from them about how communities form, fail or are sustained online.
I've been a member of one online community (email list only) for ten years. It's shrunk a bit over the years - some members have died and some have lost interest - but it's still going and we still have a few postings most weeks. We are down to 29 members, but we all agree on the list's importance to our lives. I don't see any way that maths could help predict this kind of success. Many of the members aren't able to get out much; some are enormously busy working lives. We are a mad mix of people who just happen to get on and value each other's presence. Just like any friendship group really, except that we are on three continents.
Another quite different international community that I have been in for about 8 years is extremely successful in another way. It has a much more mixed, lively and mobile membership; presently just under 200 with a core of about 50 regular posters. It also has a website with photographs of members and their projects (it is craft-based), lists of members' webpages and blogs etc, which is maintained regularly. Again, the list is very important to the people who subscribe to it.
Neither of these groups is based at Yahoo, but a scan of the email groups that are based at there will show how many never get off the ground, but there are a few that do and remain hugely successfully, with many regular postings, pretty much indefinitely. I wonder if they have anything in common?
M-H
On 22/12/2006, at 11:22 AM, Hugemusic wrote:
Sorry, guys but I just don't agree.
Sure, there's no hard and fast number that will indicate a critical mass for all, but there has to be some statistical indicator of probable sustainability - we're just not exploring the relationships deeply enough yet.