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Physicists Find Users Uninterested After 36 Hours
SuperGrads writes "Statistical physicists working in the US and Hungary have found that the number of people reading a particular news story on the web decreases with time by a power law rather than exponentially as was previously thought. The finding has implications for the study of information flow in social networks, marketing and web design."
I'm wondering if these same researches tried to define what their subjects defined as "news"? If something was newsworthy, I'm guessing they likely found out about it over time. Maybe the people didn't read it because they were informed from other sources?
Sounds like a bit of a flawed evaluation to me.
I'll create an amusing sig when I have something meaningful to post.
Wow. It didn't even take that long.
But seriously, I wonder if this will change ad placement for revenue models? If an ad gets a click on a story older than 36 hours, is it worth more? Hmm, I smell a patent in the works, too.
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
This is why badnews in politics is always released late on friday. By Monday, everyone has ignored it.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
1. If you go on vacation, and spend the usual two to four weeks relaxing, ignoring all the news except maybe browsing the headlines one day a week, as I frequently do, does the news not have equal importance? In other words, perhaps most of what we call "news" is temporary by nature, and grows less relevant with the passage of time. Please note this doesn't relate to medical/health/science news, as I've read many scientific papers from years ago that are just as relevant today as they were then. Also, for those in the US and Japan, yes, the world understands you don't get much vacation, but that's your problem.
2. How much of the news is what we call 'entertainment' news? How much is 'sports' news? Such news quickly ceases to have relevance, other than to fans of both media.
3. Perhaps the lack of investigative journalism, the lack of crafting of news into stories that take days to write, has led to the current situation where news quickly becomes staledated? I've read many an old copy of The New Yorker, and most of the stories about news are still relevant today, maybe one-fourth becoming less so due to the passage of time. Consider the skill and the medium used.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...to be studying this sort of thing. In any subject where the laws of Physics apply, physicists are very well suited to look at the data. Since humans are so prone to actions that defy any logic or reason, a behavioral psychologist would be better suited to have an opinion. Let's pose this question back to Steven Hawking.
Missing blond females seem to stay in the news a lot longer than 36 hours. Most of the advertising revenue of the cable news networks is based on blond female becoming missing. Fox News, CNN and MSNBC would be reduced to covering real news if it weren't for them. I wouldn't be surprised if most weren't missing due to a conspiracy of cable news producers preying on them. They all those news vans just sitting around.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
How interest in news items evolves over time, how it depends on communication, links, and recommendations, has been the subject of research for decades. E-commerce sites use detailed models of this in order to determine when to remove items from the front page.
It is true that many people use exponential decay models, but that's not because they don't know any better, it's because exponential decay is computationally simple and works well enough. It's like using a linear approximation to a non-linear problem.
I think it's pretty telling that Barabási is publishing this in physics journals, not in statistics or web-related publications. This may be news to physicists, but it isn't news to anybody who actually works in the field and knows their stuff. The reviewers at Phys. rev. simply aren't qualified to determine whether this kind of work is novel and correct.