[bionet.molbio.genome-program] bionet/biosci popularity

roy@ALANINE.PHRI.NYU.EDU (Roy Smith) (03/21/90)

	Eliot just told me that he now has well over 600 responses
	from sites since sending out his sendsys message just last night

I'm impressed!  I've also noticed over the past few months rather a bit
more activity on the groups; scientists actually asking science-type
questions and getting science-type answers.  It used to be just people
talking about the groups, not actually using them.

	What I would be more interested in, though, is how many people
	actually read them, instead of how many computers receive them.	

I havn't been paying much attention to Brian Reid's arbitron polls.  Do
they cover the bionet groups?  If so, you might get your answer from
there.  One problem with arbitron is that people who read news via NNTP
clients like rrn (i.e. most of the people around here) don't get counted.

BTW, what's the difference between the bionet groups and biosci?  Is the
latter just your generic name for the union of the usenet, bboard, and
mailing list distributions?  Any guess as to the relative sizes of those?

kristoff@GENBANK.BIO.NET (Dave Kristofferson) (03/21/90)

> BTW, what's the difference between the bionet groups and biosci?  Is the
> latter just your generic name for the union of the usenet, bboard, and
> mailing list distributions?  Any guess as to the relative sizes of those?
> 
> 

The bionet.* groups were set up prior to our merger with the European
sites to form BIOSCI.  You can basically look at them as simply the
USENET arm of BIOSCI.  I haven't totaled up all of our local e-mail
lists lately (these vary greatly in size depending upon the group) but
probably will do so fairly soon since I'm going to give a talk about
this stuff.  Several new e-mail subscription requests come in here
each day and I'm sure the situation is similar for our colleagues in
Europe.

Dave