Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence) Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions Subject: Re: volume of traffic on the net Message-ID: Date: 16 Jan 90 04:11:09 GMT References: <632413855.12814@myrias.com> Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY Lines: 33 In article <632413855.12814@myrias.com> dbf@myrias.com (David Ferrier) writes: > Does the bulk of traffic on Usenet originate from teachers and students? Perhaps the greatest percentage of articles do come from university sites, though it seems traffic goes down more than can be accounted for by that around school breaks. Traffic begets traffic. A lot of people not in school are also on holiday around those break sessions and summer is just a nice, quiet period anyway. People in their rocking chairs sipping mint julips, y'know. It would be a difficult thing to measure accurately. For example, though I post from a .edu site I am neither student nor instructor; just a hohum staff member who was right back at work on 26 December. Also, some students have jobs at .gov or .com sites or get to the net through public access systems or UUCP machines whose com/gov/edu/mil/ whatever status is not evident from the name. There are other wrenches to throw in to the works, too, like the fact that some .edu sites don't allow students to post. For global statistics about what sort of people make up the net you'd probably find a very wide margin of misrepresentation. Sometimes you can tell be the flavour of the group, however, what to expect around break time. For example, social groups (many soc and alt groups) seem to be pretty highly populated by the younger set, which includes a lot of students. I suspect that their traffic drops more during the break periods than sci and comp groups. Of course, I don't have any hard evidence to back this up, it's just my perception after a few years of participating in USENET. Dave -- (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))