  The many-to-many social communication activity on the popular technology-news
website Slashdot has been studied. We have concentrated on the dynamics of
message production without considering semantic relations and have found
regular temporal patterns in the reaction time of the community to a news-post
as well as in single user behavior. The statistics of these activities follow
log-normal distributions. Daily and weekly oscillatory cycles, which cause
slight variations of this simple behavior, are identified. A superposition of
two log-normal distributions can account for these variations. The findings are
remarkable since the distribution of the number of comments per users, which is
also analyzed, indicates a great amount of heterogeneity in the community. The
reader may find surprising that only a few parameters allow a detailed
description, or even prediction, of social many-to-many information exchange in
this kind of popular public spaces.
