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From: gds@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU (Greg Skinner)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Statistics, polls: honest, no flames
Message-ID: <1365@mit-eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: Sun, 23-Mar-86 14:23:07 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.1365
Posted: Sun Mar 23 14:23:07 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Mar-86 02:41:37 EST
References: <2015@hao.UUCP> <3389@sun.uucp>
Distribution: net
Organization: MIT Lusers and Hosers Inc., Cambridge, Ma.
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I would like to caution that before any global decisions are made
regarding which groups to keep, etc., we wait for a lot more of the
net to report in.  For example, there have only been a few entries
from AT&T -- and none from any of the major sites (ihnp4, cbosgd,
etc.) and the sites they feed.  I believe that data will be critical
in determining net readership -- AT&T is the largest multiorganization
in Usenet and most probably has the most readers of any
multiorganization in Usenet.  I hope we get the AT&T data soon.

I think even more statistics could be taken.  For example, we could
figure out how many articles are cross-posted per newsgroup, how many
articles posted per site to a group, probably others as well.  Is the
newsstats data at seismo sufficient to extract that information?  If
not, I might write a program to take that data, if I can find the
time.

This may be a premature guess but I think one of the outcomes of this
poll will encourage local unmoderated distributions, especially if the
data bears out that the readership and writership of certain groups is
localized to certain geographic or organizational area.

-- 
It's like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin' under.

Greg Skinner (gregbo)
{decvax!genrad, allegra, gatech, ihnp4}!mit-eddie!gds
gds@eddie.mit.edu