Forum Moderators: open
from the WWW2003 Conference Proceedings as posted here [webmasterworld.com] by Msgraph.
What I found interesting was:
An interesting characteristic of many newsgroups is that people more frequently respond to a message when they disagree than when they agree. This behavior is in sharp contrast to the WWW link graph, where linkage is an indicator of agreement or common interest. By analyzing the graph structure of the responses, we are able to effectively classify people into opposite camps. In contrast, methods based on statistical analysis of text yield low accuracy on such datasets because the vocabulary used by the two sides tends to be largely identical, and many newsgroup postings consist of relatively few words of text.
Imagine some negative Pagerank or ranking effects if Google would decide to use the linking structure of the Google groups index as "negative votes"? (would be too spammable of course).
