Software spots key players in online communities

Software spots key players in online communities – tech – 20 July 2007 – New Scientist Tech:

Welser’s group found that the most informative individuals – dubbed “answer people” – are also relatively taciturn, rarely participating in discussions heavily. They also tend to shy away from the “discussion artists” who dominate most threads.

Instead, these people mostly post one or two messages to a lot of different discussion threads, and tend to respond to users who do not post a lot. They also tended to avoid long discussions, jumping in when someone had a specific question, providing a useful answer and then bowing out from further talk.

Because the findings use quantitative data about posting behaviour, Welser says they could prove useful for developing automated systems that assigns high reputation to certain people within a discussion. Or, they could make it easier for a search engine to find messages that are most likely to be useful, based on the user.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s run online communities for any length of time.

I am, however, interested to see some objective data that indicates that my belief that catering to the loudest members (my “squeaky wheels”) isn’t what makes for better communities. Or even quieter ones. Not that I’m still bitter over all of those fights about how to set “reply-to” on mailing lists or anything.

Nope. Not me.

(long story, won’t bore you)

But seriously, it’s nice to see people making headway in the quest to find ways to identify key users; although honestly, this sounds a lot like Pagerank for people….

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