Research Paper on:
Internet Group Membership and the All Macaw Group

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
engendered an environment in which people sharing common interests can gather with like-minded others. AllMacaw is a mail-list group based at Yahoo!(r) Groups that also archives posts online, enabling  group members to read individual posts in email or from the Web. The group has been in existence since 1999 and currently includes 123 members. The list owner  and a co-administrator try to limit membership to that level in an effort to minimize the amount of time they have to invest in directly overseeing the site and dealing  with the technical vagaries of bounced email messages. Selection and Observation The AllMacaw group is a membership-only email list currently maintained at Yahoo!(r)  Groups. Yahoo!s site reports that the group has been in existence since December 2001, and that was the time that the group returned to Yahoo! after relying on another  management site, SmartGroups.com, for some time. As stated, the group has been in existence since 1999, originated by a retired veterinarian who is passionate about macaws and lories but  who was frustrated with the immense volume of misinformed - and many times dangerous - opinion being promoted through other groups such as Usenets rec.pet.birds.  The student writing on this topic should note that I personally have been a member of AllMacaw since its inception and have full knowledge of the group that  is not readily apparent to those new to the group. (A site that may be good for the students own analysis is a Usenet (now owned by Google) group  known as alt.cheese, accessible at http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&num=25&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&group=alt.cheese&start=50. The observation phase of the project consisted of reading the email delivered to an email address I