I agree with that statement. What I believe people want to know is the impact of various lists relative to other methods of sharing their thoughts with colleagues in related fields.
The simple answer is that nobody really knows how to measure impact in any absolute sense. Even relative impact is extremely difficult to measure. And any numbers that are generated are suspect.
On 8/21/2013 6:24 AM, Hieu Hoang wrote:
> imo, it is an imperfect but useful bit of information to gauge the
> relative popularity of the mailing list. In Oct 2010, i asked the same
> question for some popular NLP/SMT mailing list:
> Corpora list : 3600
> EAMT - 792
> Moses - 630
But what is the relative percentage of email that subscribers actually (a) read, (b) delete within N seconds of being opened, (c) do anything about -- such as reply to, click on a URL, use as a starting point for further searches, etc. ?
John