Inhabitant’s Uses and Reactions to Usenet Social Accounting Data

Netscan social accounting data is applied both to newsgroups and participants to distinguish between useful newsgroups and those that are noisy or fractious and between authors who may be regulars or interlopers, nice people or not so nice, and those authors who have quality responses as well as a quantity of responses. Through these and other structural measures newsgroups and their members are typified, categorised and understood from a perspective not possible (or excessively costly to manually construct) through a simple archive of messages. Social accounting tools present the historical and sociological tracks of the newsgroup and are used to perform functions that seem extremely similar to those used by offline groups and organisations. Social accounting data is not merely useful for our understanding of Usenet newsgroups but may be becoming a vital and commonly used tool by the members of these kinds of discussion spaces themselves.