NPR reports that "Physicists at the University of Notre Dame and in Hungary have figured out that the prime of life for a Web news story is the first 36 hours. After that, few people read it. The physicists say Web sites are complex networks with a topology that changes as new documents and links are added and subtracted. Think of the site as a series of nodes, each of which is a news story, with a line joining each node if the two stories are connected by a hyperlink. A typical site has a "skeleton"– that’s the overall organization of the site — and its nodes, that is, the actual stories that are temporarily linked to the main structure, until they are discarded…"
NPR asked physicist David Kestenbaum to explain which he did… by drawing a diagram at left that, essentially, is the longtail.
If anyone has a link, I’d be interested to read the original research (or better yet a watered down version safe for domestic consumption) to see if they noted the secondary traffic that comes as bloggers excerpt, comment on and link back to news stories. The picture then starts off looking like a simple single wave curve ends up looking more like a wagging tail that goes up and down with small but significant bursts of blog traffic – potentially extending the duration, reach and impact of the original article.
This, of course, is part of the reason that some major news websites are starting to take notice of, and make it easy for their audiences to use, social bookmarking services like digg and de.licio.us to bookmark, link to and recommend news articles. Doing so extends the life of the article and helps reach new audiences yet requires very little work at the new organisation end because it taps into the wisdom of the crowd and the concept of crowdsourcing.
Apologies for the multiple bubble 2.0 buzzwords in this post! ;-)
(link credit and thanks to Smartmobs)
[This post was originally published on Wed 12 July 2006 but typepad has had a bit of a blip so I’ve had to repost it from a draft.]