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The evaluation of virtual community usage and user behaviour has its roots in social science approaches such as interview, document analysis and survey. Little evaluation is carried out using traffic or protocol analysis. Business approaches to evaluating customer/business web site usage are more advanced, in particular using advanced web analytics to develop greater understanding of their customers' use of their sites. The application of such techniques to virtual communities is discussed and experimentation of such techniques on a specific virtual community project demonstrates the potential for such techniques in the evaluation of social and culture web usage.
Andy Phippen (Mon,) studied this question.