Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Promoting "inet" to "world"
Message-ID: <2691@looking.UUCP>
Date: 30 Jan 89 06:58:29 GMT
References: <5917@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 43

I think a good way to figure out if such a group should move to
worldwide distribution is to figure out if worldwide distribution is
really an efficient way of doing things.

Some of these groups and/or mailing lists may have only a few dozen
readers.

The way I measure this is to try to measure the average number of
readers per site.  If an article goes to more sites (and is thus
transmitted) more times than it is actually read, that's a bad sign.
It shows serious waste.

So we should simply set a criterion for readers/site.  If it falls
below a certain threshold, the group does qualify.

The first threshold that comes to mind is 1 -- if you're below 1,
there is clearly waste.  On the other hand, mailing lists don't work
100% efficiently, and they often propagate the same article multiple
times over the same path.   In a perfect world, they wouldn't, and
the cutoff would be 1.

Only approximately 90 of the 388 current usenet groups actually meet
the criterion of 1 reader per site.

Our world isn't perfect, so a lower number, like one third comes to
my mind.  At 1/3 a group is very wasteful of net resources.  275 of
the 388 groups in the latest readership survey have 1 reader or more for
every 3 sites.  (I did this without accounting for propagation, which
alters things a bit.)

Anyway, this is how to decide on the inet groups.  I am all in favour
of any group being created that will get widely read.  There are only
2 arguments against creating a group to my mind.  The first is that
it will create excessive flamage that wouldn't otherwise exist, and
the second is that it would be a tremendous waste of net resources to
send articles to N sites just so they can be read by 1 person, where
N is sufficiently large.

(By the way, the highest readers/site currently on the net [ignoring
the bogus figure for n.announce.conferences] is 4.9, for alt.sex.
I suspect that will die down with time.  RHF is 2nd at 4.5)
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd.  --  Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473