I’d haard a guess there is a tipping point / inflection for comments where people who start getting them feel the natural (I hope) reflex o comment more.

@paul – I don’t know for sure, but my gut tells me it’s a mixture of timing (blogging isn’t a strange new thing anymore), more appropriate environment (WPMU gives each student their own spaces, as well as groups and classes, and they can do whatever they want without feeling like part of a commune), and some faculty members who are really wanting to explore this as a resource. It’s certainly NOT marketing that’s making a difference, at least directly with students (aside from a dozen or 2 posters I slapped up last semester, which were quickly overgrown by other posters)

@jim – it’s loosely based on that script, but I had to do a LOT of manual and code-based wrangling to get the numbers I wanted. I’ll spend some time trying to figure out how to automate that. The first script I wrote records snapshots of the data for easy graphing, and the ones I used for this graph mine the live database to generate historical data.