Dear Matthew and his friend - I think the quantitative surveys done by the Pew Internet & American Life project might tell one something about the frequency of online posting. www.pewinternet.org/ I am assuming these frequencies most often follows Pareto's law - that 20% of the people do 80% of the posting, etc. etc. however it would be interesting to know if that is indeed the case. There is some quantitative work on online posters to discussion lists. This project might be helpful: Wiley, D. (2002). "Calculating amount of activity in threaded discussion spaces." Sample calculations are shown and discussed for six month archives of two mailing lists relating to open source software. http://wiley.ed.usu.edu/docs/discussion08.pdf I am assuming the Wiley reference could point to further work done in this area. Cheers, Denise Denise N. Rall, PhD. Special Projects, Faculty of Arts & Science, Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW 2480 AUSTRALIA Mobile +(61) (0)438 233 344 http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/esm/staff/pages/drall/ Join the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Internet Research 10.0, October 7-11, Milwaukee, WI, USA --- On Sun, 15/3/09, Matthew W. <m-wysocki@juno.com> wrote: From: Matthew W. <m-wysocki@juno.com> Subject: [Air-L] Characteristics of online posters To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Received: Sunday, 15 March, 2009, 3:31 AM Stay connected to the people that matter most with a smarter inbox. Take a look http://au.docs.yahoo.com/mail/smarterinbox