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From: mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Don Speck)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: these sites have not filed an arbitron report
Message-ID: <4458@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Mon, 9-Nov-87 05:46:17 EST
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.4458
Posted: Mon Nov  9 05:46:17 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Nov-87 05:12:06 EST
References: <11960@decwrl.DEC.COM> <503@brandx.rutgers.edu> <366@tardis.cc.umich.edu>
Distribution: na
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 36

Being the 'conscientious bastard' (as my boss once called me) that I am,
I grep'd Brian's list for Caltech sites.  Several showed up, but none
of them is on Usenet.  They're on ARPAnet mailing lists.  Most of them
have never even heard of Usenet.

Harangues to run arbitron would do well to limit themselves to sites
listing a non-empty #U line in the uucp map, or the object of one of
those lines.  Even that is not foolproof, but it's a good start.

---

It is unfortunately very true that the arbitron sample is strongly
biased toward large machines.  Even within a large site, only the
machines with many readers run arbitron.  There are lots of workstations
here with one or two readers, for which I can't bring myself to pester
their SA's to install arbitron.

With nntp, I know exactly how many articles get read (45000 per week),
the breakdown per machine, per day, the amount of time spent, etc.
The information is all in the server's syslog, in nauseating detail,
you just have to write an awk script to parse it.  So don't complain
about nntp, write an arbitron for it!  It may be the most complete
statistics you'll get.

---

Readership statistics are, or should be, important to any SA that
faces beancounters.  When our beancounters finally come around to
ask why this user "news" is chewing up $500 of CPU per month and
then demand "Who uses it?", I'm going to *need* usage numbers to
throw at them, preferably in an imposingly thick monolithic report,
to show that it gets read by ~150 people and that equivalent mailing
list traffic would completely swamp us.  So the better arbitron
statistics I can get, the more likely Usenet is to survive review.

Don Speck   speck@vlsi.caltech.edu  {amdahl,scgvaxd}!cit-vax!speck