Scientific American:
> Researcher Itai Himelboim gathered eight million messages posted to 35 political and philosophical newsgroups—like alt.politics.usa—over a six-year period. And he analyzed the connections among the messages. Turns out that 50 percent of all replies were directed at just 2 percent of people who started threads, and who thus came to control the discussion. And the larger the newsgroup, the more polarized this effect became.
And for some recursive value:
> But these newsgroup dominators weren't posting much original content. Sixty percent of their posts were just content lifted from traditional news sources like the New York Times. Which is good news for the news business, the author says.
:-)
—ravi