Re: META: 328 subscribers

From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 04:49:04 MST


'What is your name?' 'Charlie Stross.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':

> It's a good idea but it's not as trivial as you think. For starters, how
> do you correlate with time zone distribution? You can't do it by simply
> assuming people in non-US domains are in the appropriate time zone and
> people in TLDs are in CONUS -- I post from a .org, but I'm in Scotland,
> for example. To actually understand how posting levels are going, you
> need either to go for a long-term approach ( >24 hours) or take into
> account geographical distribution.

I agree. Most people aren't reading the messages that appear on this list
on a minute-to-minute basis. Heck, a large chunk of readers get the
digest version, which is only released daily.

In light of this, anything more precise than a daily readout is probably
not going to be very helpful in determining, well, anything really.
Indeed, I rather suspect that it'll be week-by-week observations which
yield the most interesting results.

************

Frankly, though, I'd rather someone get the search engine working again
(AHEM!) before anyone starts working on this. Right now it's completely
broken.

***********

-Dan

      -unless you love someone-
    -nothing else makes any sense-
           e.e. cummings



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