Hi, Paul: I suppose that you don't want to know that it's sunny and about 100F here in Northern California!
To answer your questions:
It's difficult to say how often all of our 15,500+ members check the site, because all of the content on the site is public, which doesn't mean you have to sign in to see it. (Our philosophy is to make this content as easy to see as possible, and as easy to share as possible.) So, if you go to the home page, you'll often see hundreds of current visitors; most will be guests, while perhaps fewer than 20 of those are members. Since people don't need to log in to see content, the only people logging in are people who are posting blogs, videos, comments, etc.
People's activity is rated only when they log in and contribute, so you can see on their profile where they are. Our network, like others, pretty follows the 1-10-100 rule. For every 100 members, there's one that participates regularly, 10 that participate occasionally, and 89 that only read.
If you go to a person's profile page, you can see all of their activity, and drill down into different types of activity, ranging from the content they posted to comments.
If people configure their notifications to receive no emails from ACEsConnection, then people won't receive an email that's a personal message.
You can search members by geography...here's how.
As far as activity on the network, this year we've gone past two million page views per month. Last month we had more than 2,600,000 page views.
The network has more than 15,000 blog posts, more than 3,000 comments, and more than 1,500 video clips. For a small community-of-practice social network, that's pretty good. We're not a discussion network; we're an information and support network, so that ratio is about right.
Next month, we'll be rolling out a new suite of tools and guidelines for local ACEs initiatives (city, county, region, state) to start and grow groups that support and measure the goals of their local work, so I expect that the number of geographic-based groups, which number about 70, will grow.