It’s nice to see someone trying to do something a little experimental to help people get an overview of the messages on the message boards they use.
They say initial feedback has been positive – hard to tell whether that is just because people react well when researchers pay attention to them but they intend to continue keeping an eye on the experiment.
I hope it is successful – we need new “blue sky” thinking to make online communities more approachable and useful – and I hope if it is useful they release the enabling software into the public domain.
The paper about the research is here – Rehman Mohamed is one of the researchers.
Thanks to Mathemagenic for the link.
