The Dynamics of Personal Territories on the Web
HT '09: Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, New York, NY, USA, ACM, (July 2009)Abstract
In this paper, we present a long-term study of user-centric Web traffic data collected in 2000-2002 and 2005-2006 from two large representative panels of French Internet users. Our work focuses on the dynamics of personal territories on the Web and their evolution between 2000 and 2006. At the session level, we distinguish four profiles of browsing dynamics in 2005-2006, and point out the growing dichotomy between straight routine sessions and exploratory browsing. At a global level, we observe that although each individuals corpus of visited sites is permanently growing, his browsing practices are structured around routine well-known sites which operate as links providers to new sites. We argue that this tension between the known and the unknown is constitutive of Web practices and is a fundamental property of personal Web territories.
