Figure 1

Post lengths in bytes (characters). Distribution of post lengths (in bytes) in various discussion fora. Top left: BBC discussions, top right political discussion fora in Poland, bottom left MySpace discussions, bottom right YouTube comments. Despite language and cultural differences the distributions are quite similar and can be well approximated with lognormal Partial Distribution Function. The parameters of the best fit are, for BBC: $\mu =5.417$, $\sigma =1.145$; for Polish fora: $\mu =5.08$, $\sigma =0.97$; for MySpace $\mu =4.278$ and $\sigma =1.042$ and for YouTube $\mu =4.056$ and $\sigma =1.086$. The insets show logbinned data on log-log scale, emphasizing the behavior for long posts.