[Air-l] gini coefficients for measuring participation?

[Steffen Albrecht]

Dear all,

"Karim R. Lakhani" wrote:
(...)
> - there are also practicalities to consider.  a low GINI number in a
> list serv may mean that there is just a ton of noise.  imagine being on
> a list where every one wanted to chime in and give their $0.02.  it
> would get pretty noisy, pretty fast.  and maybe not very effective.

As I read this post, I remembered having read that a number of people
have been working on power law theories describing generally the
distribution of links in a network, i.e. a rather uneven dsitribution,
with many nodes having small numbers of edges, and a very few having
very large numbers of edges connected to them. Thinking of Usenet
discussions as networks (nodes=actors, edges=messages), one would expect
the distribution of messages/authors to follow such a power law.
(Interestingly, physicists relate the occurence of power law-like
distributions to the phenomenon of self-organisation, confirming the
consideration by Karim.) Now, I was wondering whether anybody has
thought about analyzing the distributions of messages in newsgroups etc.
in such a way to find out about the type of distribution? Until now, I
only know of some Gini/Lorenz-curve analyses.

Greetings, Steffen

---------------------------

Steffen Albrecht

TU Hamburg-Harburg
AB 1-11
Schwarzenbergstr. 95
21071 Hamburg
Germany

Tel. +49 40 42878-3680
Fax: +49 40 42878-2635
eMail: steffen.albrecht at tuhh.de
www: http://www.tu-harburg.de/tbg