(from the 5/02/03 issue of Microsoft Watch)<

Marc Smith is obsessed with the lowly message thread.

Smith is a sociologist who happens to work in Microsoft's Research organization. His specialty is "social cyberspace" or, as some prefer to call it, "online communities." Within this huge space, Smith is most intrigued by threads.

Check Out Smith's Home Page

"From the sociological point of view, this is a Petri dish," says Smith about Usenet, e-mail lists, Microsoft Communities sites, Weblogs, Web boards and the like.

Smith isn't so much interested in the content of Web traffic (other than messages about Microsoft and its products) as he is in the patterns of traffic. Smith and his team are analyzing posting trends, hoping to understand Web phenomena that Microsoft can ultimately harness for its own and its customers' benefit.

In graduate school, Smith started mining Usenet "social-accounting" data down to the newsgroup, author, thread and time levels. He came up with a project for analyzing this data, called Netscan—which he brought with him to Microsoft when he joined the company in 1998.

Dig Into the Netscan Home Page

Netscan helps Microsoft Research make connections between the size and nature of groups, reputations of individuals, quantities and qualities of group postings, and so on. For instance, Microsoft has discovered direct correlations between the number of different groups to which an individual posts and whether that individual is a knowledgeable community member or a spammer.

The Netscan team is hoping to transfer this knowledge to Microsoft product teams, such as the Outlook development team and Product Support Services (PSS) team, to aid them in designing future product and/or service releases.

Ultimately, Smith sees PSS being able to piggyback on Netscan data to reach out proactively to customers.

"We're thinking about bolting community interaction onto newsgroups. We'd be able to ask things like, 'Did you get your question answered?' That would be very interesting to our support folks," Smith explains.

The Netscan team has a bunch of projects related to Netscan that it is planning to roll out starting this summer.

A research prototype of a Community Portal Page will be one of the first such deliverables, says Smith. Such a page would allow user communities on Usenet or other places on the Web to access data easily about themselves -- information such as growth rates, number of active participants and profiles on participants.

Currently, Netscan generates this kind of information but doesn't display it in a simple form. Smith's team wants to upgrade the frequency with which it tabulates this data (from once a month to twice daily by the end of 2003) and to expose it in a more understandable way, he says. This kind of page ultimately could be used by enterprises to collect data on their own internal "communities," or by particular vertical associations or organizations, Smith adds.

Another deliverable Smith wants to roll out this summer is "MyMicrosoft.com" -- another type of portal page.
He says this portal page will be designed for individuals rather than organizations or companies. It will provide them with a way to see all the information pertaining to any Usenet threads of which they are part. So, if an individual asks for help with a SQL Server issue, he or she will be able to look at all the posts relating to the query, along with a type of "ratings" system about the posters, enabling the individual to make more informed choices about which threads to read and trust.