The number of PostsPerMonth seems like a useful metric for comparing the level of activity on interactive, cooperative projects such as wiki websites, weblogs, public CVS repositories, etc. In the case of wikis, this is more often referred to as "edits" per month, and the word "submissions" could be used as well.
Of course, posts can be big and small and perhaps this should be weighed into the metric. However, the same is true for the database performance metric "transactions per minute" (TPM).
From a technical perspective (performance optimization), it could interesting to compare the number of posts per month to the number of page views per month, to get the write-to-read ratio. It seems that wikis can have 100 or 1000 reads (page views) for every write (edit, post, submission). Is the ratio similar for blogs?
During August 2003, the English WikiPedia had 125 K (125 thousand) edits, and in the same month, ProjectGutenberg's DistributedProofreaders made edits to the OCR text of 129,273 printed pages. Is it anywhere near useful to compare these numbers? Should it be the topic of a ranking, similar to the BiggestWiki page?
What are the numbers for SlashDot (probably the biggest blog) and SourceForge (a big public CVS repository)?
See also
- TransactionBasedCommunity
- The WikiPedia edits per month statistics can be found on http://www.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesDatabaseEdits.htm
- A diagram with an English legend for the user activity on SusningNu can be found on http://susning.nu/Susning.nu/trafik
This page was started by LarsAronsson. Feel free to edit and improve.