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May 16, 2003
Netscan
I had the good fortune to attend a talk today by Marc Smith, a sociologist at Microsoft Research. Marc's system, Netscan, tracks Usenet messages and lets you ask questions like "Which authors reply to lots of questions but don't ask many?" and "What groups have lots of long threads?". It's fascinating stuff, and readily accessible from their Web frontend. I'd love to see this kind of analysis applied to weblogs.
Posted by Andrew Grumet at May 16, 2003 11:52 PM
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This would be hugely useful when trying to grow community sites -- for example, it could drive seed content creation and influence assignment of moderators. So much of that work is now done anecdotally or by crude traffic analyses.
Posted by: Perry Hewitt at May 19, 2003 11:39 AM