this post will be obsolete in 36 hours
be warned that this story — and any other on the web — will be barely read by anyone 36 hours after it was first posted.
physicsweb
This is an interesting article trying to assess the transience of the attention of people using the web. It states that accesses to an article follow a power law curve and not an exponential curve as has been previously suggested. I went looking for an explanation of “power law” and found the following graph and article at wikipedia.
It makes more sense to me if I think of this as a different power law for each article, some will be more interesting and some less and so audiences will either pay attention as if k = 3 (didn”t really care) or as if k = 1 (the article had a little more staying power). The curves are more likely to look something like this
the first graph is from this article on Pareto Distribution
the second image is from this manual
So this article is referring to articles which are already obsolete and will itself be obsolete very shortly…so the web really must be about the long tail for this to be useful in the long term…’