[Pdx-pm] Trends in Internet usage

[John Melesky]

On Apr 8, 2009, at 3:45 PM, Jeff Zucker wrote:
>  I'm looking for trends in usage of various Internet modes of  
> information delivery/communication, especially the role of mailing  
> lists.  Is the use of listservs and other mailing lists rising,  
> falling, or remaining flat?  How does it compare to social  
> networking in over-all usage?  I've browsed around netstats and  
> server-watch and w3c and  various sites by contributors to the  
> listserv software but without finding anything even close.

I can't think of an untainted source of that info (aside from asking  
your friend at a major ISP to run morally questionable traffic  
analyses). One approach to consider, though, is hitting places like  
Yahoo! Groups. Spider through (all or a sampling of) the groups and  
build a mailing list history for each one (that has publicly available  
data), then do some analysis on those numbers. The same process could  
be repeated for other mailing list hosting sites that provide such data.

One thing to note, though, is that these sites frequently have methods  
of posting aside from email, which pollutes the info a bit.

A similar source would be publicly-available mailman sites. These can  
be tough to find, though. One method of tracking them down is  
searching for a (hopefully long enough to be identifying) string from  
the base page. "below is a listing of all the public mailing lists on"  
seems to work well[1].

Hope that helps.

-johnnnnnnn


[1] for example: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22below+is+a+listing+of+all+the+public+mailing+lists+on%22