response rate

Percentage of active users in the Internet 2.0 is tiny. Fractions go from * only 1% of Wikipedia's users contribute to making it better * only 0.1% of users upload their own videos to Youtube * only 3% of people with weblogs post on a daily basis * only 1% of Amazon.com customers contribute with reviews The numbers are tiny. But not uncommon. Typical return rates of marketing campaigns or surveys are around 2-5% (see report by the Direct Marketing Association). ...

In a recent Nature article, Albert-Lászlo Barabási and João Gama Oliveira, have found the perfect excuse for lazy people not answering some emails in their inbox: they analyzed the time response of emails and found that they follow a power law probability distribution of the form P(t) = 1/t. In particular this implies that not even the mean response time is finite. Hey! why should you then expect me to answer your emails within my lifetime period! ...