Content: 36 hours from news to stale

[mandy]

Barabasi's team calculated the "half-life" of a news document, which corresponds to the period in which half of all visitors that eventually access it have visited. The researchers found that the overall half-life distribution follows a power law, which indicates that most news items have a very short lifetime, although a few continue to be accessed well beyond this period. The average half-life of a news item is just 36 hours, or one and a half days after it is released. While this is short, it is longer than predicted by simple exponential models, which assume that web page browsing is less random than it actually is.

The short life of a news item -- combined with random visiting patterns of readers -- implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts. The results also show that people read a particular web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily...

full article: http://www.physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/7/3/1

Studies by statistical physicists in the United States and in Hungary have found that the readership of a particular article declines with time, the science site PhysicsWeb reported.

Although the study focused on news, and used a popular Hungarian web portal as its testing ground, the findings apply to those who design websites or write blogs. It also indicated how information may be moving through a social network...

Their findings make a good argument for syndication of content, whether through an opt-in email newsletter or via RSS feeds...

full article: http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports...oLive.html