Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Dynamics of Information Access on the Web
ArXiv Physics e-prints, (May 12, 2005)Abstract
While current studies on complex networks focus on systems that change
relatively slowly in time, the structure of the most visited regions of
the Web is altered at the timescale from hours to days. Here we
investigate the dynamics of visitation of a major news portal,
representing the prototype for such a rapidly evolving network. The
nodes of the network can be classified into stable nodes, that form the
time independent skeleton of the portal, and news documents. The
visitation of the two node classes are markedly different, the skeleton
acquiring visits at a constant rate, while a news document's visitation
peaking after a few hours. We find that the visitation pattern of a news
document decays as a power law, in contrast with the exponential
prediction provided by simple models of site visitation. This is rooted
in the inhomogeneous nature of the browsing pattern characterizing
individual users: the time interval between consecutive visits by the
same user to the site follows a power law distribution, in contrast with
the exponential expected for Poisson processes. We show that the
exponent characterizing the individual user's browsing patterns
determines the power-law decay in a document's visitation. Finally, our
results document the fleeting quality of news and events: while fifteen
minutes of fame is still an exaggeration in the online media, we find
that access to most news items significantly decays after 36 hours of
posting.
