Re: Weekly posting summary

Peter H. Coffin wrote:
> Top 20 posters for the 7 day period ending Thu Mar 27 05:00:04 GMT 2008.
> 
> posts kbytes  name                         address
>  25     55.3  %                            persent@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>  25     40.1  erithromycin                 erithromycin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>  15     28.7  Peter H. Coffin              hellsop@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>  10     28.8  Hoots                        ratty_dew@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   8     56.5  whisky-dave                  whisky-dave@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   8     47.5  H Duffy                     
hester_duffy@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   7     14.0  coyote                       no@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   7     11.6  Jennie Kermode               "Jennie
Kermode"@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   6     20.1  Will                         onebigbad@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   4      8.7  MoonShadow                   bluemoon.shadows@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   4      8.6  NightMist                    nightmiste@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   4      7.2  caterbro@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
         caterbro@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   4      5.8  Edward Scissorhands          EdwardS@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      8.1  Joseph Brenner               doom@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      7.0  c_death                      death+google@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      6.4  Wraithlady                   wraithlady@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      6.2  Fnord Prefect Fnord          fnordikins@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      6.0  Kay                          Happy_One777@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      4.7  Dag                          dwastberg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>   3      4.7  Rob                          dbright@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 what happens when I work too hard???

BTW, over the years I have noticed that around every February (and yes, 
I DO know it's March, but it seems to be right around this time of year) 
quite a few groups get very slow, though a.g doesn't completely 
consistently follow this schedule.  But usually about now, someone posts 
about the "death of Usenet" and how, especially, discussion newsgroups 
are no longer viable because "hardly anybody" posts anymore.  The word 
"obsolete" comes up.

I see this as an albeit-cyclic parallel to those people who believe that 
books -- the ones made of paper & such -- will disappear because you can 
get the content in such supposedly-new-and-improved ways now.

And yet, despite the doom-and-gloom predictions, and despite web-boards 
and e-books and books-on-tape and instant-messaging ... more books are 
sold, and more people are on news servers.  Amazon's books business is 
thriving, new newsgroups still are created, and although it's a 
by-the-skin-of-your-teeth effort sometimes, there are more NSPs than 
ever before, and some of them even have customer bases in the 
hundreds-of-thousands.


I'm sure I've substantially-enough muddled the topic here to impress a 
few people with the fuzziness of my mind.

But I just wanted to say:  so here we are.  Yes, it's slow, but it will 
be so at times.  And within the space of a month or two, it will be busy 
again.

And frankly, knowing the reason behind the high numbers in Dec 2006 and 
Jan 2007, I'd almost prefer it this way.

-- Troia