Ethan Zuckerman has a great post up on Visualizing Social Networks via Excel, and shares some interesting behavioral patterns for Usenet technical support via Microsoft Research.
The findings identified some key behavioral patterns in participants:
Rather than analyzing the content of these newsgroups (hard to do, as they’re huge), Smith and his team looked at structures. They did a great deal of network mapping, graphing the posts and responses, and seeing the structures that emerge. At least three types have emerged:
- Answer people – these people almost never post new threads, but answer the queries of a large number of unconnected people. In network terms, they’ve got high out-degree and low in-degree. These folks are utterly essential in the functioning of technical newsgroups, as they’re the folks that newbies end up getting support from
- Reply magnets – some people have a gift (or a technique) for posting in a way that gets responses. Reply magnets are the opposite of answer people – they post infrequently and everyone answers. Smith sees roughly 0.5% of these people in newsgroups, but their posts get 30% of the responses from roughly 30% of all users. Basically, these folks are specialists in setting the agenda, which has interesting implications for political discussions in newsgroups, as these folks are capable of nominating agenda topics with much more success that the average user.
- Discussion people both post and answer a lot, and have long, sustained connections with lots of people. They’re the classic discussion group user, but they’re less common that we tend to assume.
This echos what I’m seeing in the community behavioral analysis I’ve been performing; while there is some movement between behavior types, it’s typically incident based. Once the incident that prompted the change in behavior ends, so does the change in behavior.
Oh and the title? Well, as you might have guessed, I fall into the answer type, so feel free to ask away in comments!
