With a daily newspaper, there is a tacit understanding: That day’s paper is the latest news; yesterday’s paper becomes old news — recycling-bin fodder, fishwrap, bird-cage liner, art-project makings, whatever.
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The Internet is a 24/7 environment, where everything is happening all the time, right now. That’s because it’s a hive-mind of people spread across the planet, and something’s always happening somewhere. Sinatra wanted to wake up in a city that never sleeps; the Internet is the digital-world equivalent of New York City — only with a population in the billions.
How, then, does one tell when news goes from “new” to “old” when the Internet is in a state of eternal “now”? Well, one does a study, of course, to make that determination. The results are interesting, and, frankly, encouraging to us hidebound, green-visored, blue-pen-toting purveyors of paper and ink (in addition to our online offering at http://www.ldnews.com, come visit anytime.)
In the June issue of Physical Review E, the journal of the American Physical Society, Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame, reported that the half-life of the average news article on the Internet is 36 hours. That means, in an article’s first 36 hours of accessibility online, half of those who will seek it out have done so. Others come along later for research projects, by happenstance, for historical review or for any other reason one happens to look at a give Web page.
They are comparing apples and oranges. 36 hours may be Internet news half-life span. But 24-hours is MSM whole-life span.
Thus, a piece of news in today’s newspaper expires within 24 hours. That’s it. Kaputt.
But on the Internet, a piece of news has a 36-hour long “head” and who-knows-how-long tail. Just like you can have Long Tail concept applied to merchandise, space, or news sources, you can also apply it to time.
So, if a piece of news appears online (let’s presume on an MSM page), it takes about 36 hours for half of the audience of that page to read the news. But, if the news is important or exciting, once big-hitters (e.g., A-listers) in the blogosphere take it and run with it, they have their own 36 hours in addition to the original 36 (though there is likely to be some overlap).
Then, it percolates through the smaller and smaller blogs, each having its own 36-hour half-life span. Not to mention that frequently-updated blogs may have a shorter half-life span for any individual item than those who blog once a day or less.
If the news are really important, bloggers have shown that the news can be consciously kept alive for many days, even weeks at a time, through blogsawrms and the like, often until MSM is forced to take up the story again (or for the first time) and/or until there is a resolution (e.g,. a bill passes in the House or something ).
Thus, it is silly to talk about “half-life” on the Internet. Each piece of news gets as mcuh time as people think it deserves. Unlike in MSM, when every piece of news dies at midnight.