> -----Original Message-----
> From: DL Neil [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
...
> Which begs the questions:
> - in what way are you analyzing "behavior"? and
> - in what way are you analyzing this list-community?
"There's too much to read," is the simple answer to the first question.
Over the last few years, I've developed some methods of identifying the most
influential people in on-line discussions by discovering social networks.
Among them, I'm quite sure, are people who are opinion leaders. By
identifying them, it's possible to track ideas and trends.
Not long after I first started doing this, I did some brainstorming about it
with O'Reilly & Associates, which uses such techniques to help decide which
open source projects have momentum, so that they can make better decisions
about what books to publish. In fact, MySQL v. mSQL was one of the early
areas they studied. I also started a company, Opion Inc., to do this kind
of analysis for the stock market, movies and other areas. Opion recently
sold its technology to Intelliseek (and I have no idea what they're doing
with it, but it's not hard to imagine). They seem to have a server on-line
at www.opion.com, but it's secured.
As for this community, my "analysis" is limited to reading the messages that
either have interesting subjects or senders. By eyeballing the folder that
contains them, that is, since my software tries to figure out what's
interesting as well.
Just to put some fears to rest, which usually come up quickly, I long ago
recognized that the list of influential people is something of a spammer's
dream. Equally long ago, it was obvious that such lists have to be
unavailable to anyone else. It's an interesting, familiar paradox -- how to
use the data without revealing enough that it could be abused.
I don't want to get any further into the various issues around this research
here unless it has something to do directly with MySQL.
Nick
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