Novelty and collective attention / Huberman and Wu
If you wait long enough, it won't be novel, and thus it won't be worthwhile to pay attention to. Thus by incorporating a delay loop into your news consumption you'll miss a bunch of transient spikes of things that are no longer newsworthy.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/104/45/17599
Novelty and collective attention
Fang Wu and Bernardo A. Huberman*
Information Dynamics Laboratory, HewlettPackard Laboratories, Palo
Alto, CA 94304
Edited by Harry L. Swinney, University of Texas, Austin, TX, and
approved September 14, 2007 (received for review May 25, 2007)
The subject of collective attention is central to an information age
where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus
of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and
eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the
dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an
interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news
stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model
characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate
that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention
fades.
(via dragomir radev)
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