Analysis of some newsgroups traffic

by Nasser M. Abbasi,  Updated Nov 15, 2010

Data was imported from Google newsgroup. I could not obtain data for R so I do not have it here.
Plots are made for the following groups

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"CAS_trends_1.gif"

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group URL
fortran http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.fortran/about
matlab http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.matlab/about
mathematica http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica/about
maple http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.maple/about
scilab http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.scilab/about
symbolic http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.symbolic/about
ada http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ada/about
python http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/about
lisp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/about
java http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java.programmer/about?
ruby http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.ruby/about
cobol http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.cobol/about
scheme http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.scheme/about
sagesupport http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support/about
sagedevel http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/about
dsp http://groups.google.com/group/comp.dsp/about?
num-analysis http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math.num-analysis/about?
tex http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/about?
math http://groups.google.com/group/sci.math/about?
physics http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics/about?
maxima http://www.math.utexas.edu/pipermail/maxima/

Show trends of each group on its own, y-axis is average number of posts per months, x-axis is month number starting the count from from 1988. Notice some groups are older than others.

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"CAS_trends_2.gif"

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"CAS_trends_3.gif"

Make bar chart showing average posts per month for each group

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"CAS_trends_4.gif"

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Graphics:Average posts per month for number of news groups

Show all traffic on one plot

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"CAS_trends_6.gif"

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"CAS_trends_7.gif"

How was the plots generated?

The data above was obtained for each system. Each entry in the list is the number of posts per month. Matlab started in 1993. Fortran in 1988,  The Other systems did not start until later. A list plot was generated for each data, comparing systems against each others.

Sage has 2 groups. Support and Developer. It was suggested that only Support be used. Hence in the plots below, only Support is used. Average number of posts per month is also compared between all the systems. Data used is cut off at end of October 2010. Does not include November 2010.

Plots are all shown below.

Function to download the data

Thanks goes to mark mcclure for providing thess functions on the newsgroup. Made downloading data much easier.

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"CAS_trends_8.gif"

Get all the data into arrays and process

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"CAS_trends_9.gif"

Spikey Created with Wolfram Mathematica 7.0