[Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?

[Hugemusic]

Yes, well, these issues are perplexing, but not insurmountable.

I'm sure the early scientists who wondered why trees burn but (some) rocks 
don't thought they had a similar problem on their hands ...

Maths can help with anything that can be quantified - strength of 
relationships, passion of the content, capacity for "leakage" of involvement 
(the extent to which participants have a choice of fora) even "importance to 
our lives" can be quantified ... it's a matter of coming up with imaginative 
and reproduceable metrics, crunching the numbers and seeing whether anything 
useful emerges.

I read this morning 
(http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/technology/s/231/231348_technology_could_spell_the_end_for_radio_djs.html?ref=emtaf&archive=archive) 
about some people at Edinburgh who say they can replace DJs with a digital 
agent to construct playlists tailored to your taste.  I'd love to see the 
maths behind that.  No doubt it's a little primitive, but I also read 
yesterday 
(http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2006/12/20/the-man-from-google-returns/) 
that Google can predict, based on seach data, the gross takings of a movie 
with 82% accuracy - six weeks before its release!  And no doubt they'll get 
more accurate with refinement.

The numbers can tell all sorts of stories if we begin to explore them - 
we're just blinded by the size of the task and the lack of obvious metrics.

Incidentally, a quick peruse of the groups in Myspace shows a similar 
pattern to the one you observe in Yahoo! groups and as has been reported 
concerning blog activity.  Very Long Tail, all of them ... but wait - that's 
a mathematical relationship!

Cheers,
Hughie


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Mary-Helen Ward" <mhward at usyd.edu.au>
To: <>; "Hugemusic" <hmusic at ozemail.com.au>
Sent: Friday, December 22, 2006 11:01 AM
Subject: Re: [Air-l] Community "Critical Mass"?


>I realise that email lists seem a bit 'old hat', but I think that  there is 
>a lot to be learned from them about how communities form,  fail or are 
>sustained online.
>
> I've been a member of one online community (email list only) for ten 
> years. It's shrunk a bit over the years - some members have died and  some 
> have lost interest - but it's still going and we still have a  few 
> postings most weeks. We are down to 29 members, but we all agree  on the 
> list's importance to our lives. I don't see any way that maths  could help 
> predict this kind of success. Many of the members aren't  able to get out 
> much; some are enormously busy working lives. We are  a mad mix of people 
> who just happen to get on and value each other's  presence. Just like any 
> friendship group really, except that we are  on three continents.
>
> Another quite different international community that I have been in  for 
> about 8 years is extremely successful in another way. It has a  much more 
> mixed, lively and mobile membership; presently just under  200 with a core 
> of about 50 regular posters. It also has a website  with photographs of 
> members and their projects (it is craft-based),  lists of members' 
> webpages and blogs etc, which is maintained  regularly. Again, the list is 
> very important to the people who  subscribe to it.
>
> Neither of these groups is based at Yahoo, but a scan of the email  groups 
> that are based at there will show how many never get off the  ground, but 
> there are a few that do and remain hugely successfully,  with many regular 
> postings, pretty much indefinitely. I wonder if  they have anything in 
> common?
>
> M-H
>
> On 22/12/2006, at 11:22 AM, Hugemusic wrote:
>
>> Sorry, guys but I just don't agree.
>>
>> Sure, there's no hard and fast number that will indicate a critical  mass 
>> for
>> all, but there has to be some statistical indicator of probable
>> sustainability - we're just not exploring the relationships deeply 
>> enough
>> yet.
>