Demographics and Statistics

It is impossible to gather certain demographic information from the TOMB, simply because most registered users do not choose to include a great deal of information about age, gender, economic status, ethnicity, or race. (None of these indicators are required fields when registering.) However, it is possible to glean some interesting facts from the available data. As of November 26, 2007, TOMB users had posted a total of 424973 articles, and there were 10720 registered users. Most users ever online was 212 on Mon Jun 25, 2007 7:16 pm. Based on a very rough review of user profiles, members are predominantly male, although certain female members maintain a strong and vocal presence on the various forums. The web site administrator is, in fact, a woman, and she acts as moderator on two of the forums.

Of the twelve active forums, the most popular by far--based on number of posts--is Gear Talk (57,181 posts), followed by Recording Techniques (36, 530 posts). The fifth most popular forum is Buy/Sell/Trade, with well over 14,000 posts. The disparity in numbers between this forum and the other more popular ones mentioned above suggests that while the TOMB does serve as a viable alternative to eBay and craigslist, most members are there to discuss recording and equipment, not to buy/sell/trade. This indicates a greater degree of discourse, too. And while some members are clearly frequent contributors, it appears that lurkers are not as common as some research on other virtual communities suggests (see Preece, p. 87). Out of 200 randomly sampled members, the average number of posts (i.e., mean) per user was 54. However, a more careful reading of the data betrays the usefulness of this number. The mode of the data set (or number that appears most frequently) was actually 0. The standard deviation from the mean was a whopping 267! Perhaps the more useful statistic was a calculation of the trim mean, which is the mean after 10% of the "outliers" were eliminated (i.e., the top and bottom 10%). This number resulted in an average of 10 posts per member.