NS: Software spots key players in online communities

[joyrex]

I looked around the forum and seemed like this bit didn't have a thread yet:

http://www.newscientisttech.com/article/dn12310-software-spots-key-players-in-online-communities.html
Software that identifies the most informative people in an online community, based on their posting patterns, has been developed by researchers at Cornell University

Who would the software promote at JREF? :) And could it tackle all those woo-bashing threads at R&P... An interesting invention for the "Web 2.0" anyway.

[Pipirr]

Very interesting.


They rated the content of a total of 5,700 messages from about 450 active users. Then they calculated how often each user replied to messages or were replied to, how often each person started a discussion, and how many posts they contributed to an individual thread. Then, by going through each message and rating their usefulness, they were able to spot patterns in the behaviour of different posters.


Sounds like hard work, as the rating appears to have been done on a post by post basis. It would be fascinating to see such ratings applied here.