Population estimation of internet forum community by posted article distribution

Abstract

Traditionally, it seems that there are no typical patterns or regularities on an internet forum and the bulletin board because it is a result of voluntary behaviour of an individual user. However, recent studies show distribution of the number of posted articles per user on them follows as a power law distribution. We think that this regularity of the emergent behaviour is very important for understanding social science and human communication because it is possible to estimate the number of lurkers of each forum thread only using by usually observable data. In this paper, we proposed a set of estimation methods based on preferential attachment which is emerged by reciprocity as a human trait. The effectiveness of our proposed estimation methods is verified by comparing it with indices to be strongly related to the population of its corresponding human behaviour. © Springer-Verlag 2010.