Re: To Whom It May Concern

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Glenn Loves Jezebel (lf7z@midway.uchicago.edu)
Sat, 15 Jul 95 21:16:01 CDT


> Lloyd Wood <wood@email.enst.fr>
> > Gareth Branwyn, Wired Magazine, writes:
> > I'm interested in getting download data on the 10 most popular FAQs at your
> > site. I do the Wired Top Ten List and would like to do "Most Popular FAQs."
> > Please let me know if this is a possibility.
>
> Hmmmm. What with FAQ web servers and the rest, asssuming that the ten
> most popular FAQs downloaded from a single ftp site, rtfm, are the
> most popular FAQs is an assumption worthy of Marty Rimm at best.
.....
> Wouldn't it be fairer to assume that the ten most widely read newsgroups
> with frequently posted FAQs would contain the ten most widely-read FAQs?
> Our medium is usenet, after all.

Not necessarily, there are a lot of general-purpose FAQs out there.
For instance, I occasionally seek out the a.b.p. FAQ for the
multi-platform listings of graphics/animation programs, but haven't
checked the groups for anything else in years. There are also things
like "How To Create A Newsgroup" in news.groups (which I only
subscribe to when I have to :-) and plenty of other general things
with high utility attached to newsgroups and mailing lists that users
may or may not read on a regular basis.

> Of course, accurately making the measurements based on that assumption
> is going to be difficult. An exercise for the reader.

I'm not sure you could do it accurately. Better just to make a
subjective list based on usenet readership, degree of general utility,
and the like, but accompany it with caveats and not pretend it's
scientific. >B^)

Pax ex machina,
Glenn
......................................................................
"I don't want another one of your rational explanations"
--- My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult
g-carnagey@uchicago.edu, if you must know
<A HREF="http://www.digimark.net/wraith/">Phone Homey the Page!</A>
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