Ah yes, but what's the average lifespan of an article in a daily newspaper? That's right: 24 hours.

In other words, the internet is *slowing* the spread of information. Crazy, huh?

But the half-life of a newspaper article would be a lot less than 24 hours. I guess most people read their paper (or least the frontpage) in the morning, so we may be talking about a half-life of only a couple of hours.
Also, as most newspapers, a Hungarian website a fairly local source of information. I would expect that sites visited by a more international audience would have an even longer half-life than 36 hours due to different time zones.

I'm curious as to what the results would be if they did the same study on blog posts. I suspect for the majority of posts the results would be similar, although the half life number might vary in interesting ways. But from watching my own blog and the ones I host, it is clear that certain blog posts, I guess you could call them the hits, have a much, much longer life. A google powered life, that pushes the half life number out into months, if not years...

I agree with Abe that blogposts seem different to me, especially blogs with small readerships. Sure, Boing Boing is probably a lot like the Hungarian news site -- but Joey McBlogsalot's 'long tail equilibrium' traffic (fed by Google) is probably not that much lower than his normal day-to-day traffic.

Also, there's a new very strong force in blog traffic these days -- the referral spikes driven by other big blogs and filter sites like Digg, sometimes days, weeks or even YEARS after an item is posted. Of course those are not generally news-related (that's the key distinction here); maybe they're just funny, or have some sort of useful how-to information, etc., etc.

I wonder what a time v. comment quality graph would look like?

Also, not that anyone cares, but I wanted to mention (apologize for?) not sticking with CD the past month... I moved to the other side of the country and switched jobs & industries, so I haven't read any RSS for about a whole month. I'm back though :)

Glad to have you back, sir! I've not been posting much the last few weeks, because I've been so nuts with work.

Yeah, the question of whether this idea extends to blog postings is interesting. Again, looking at my user data, I'd say it seems true -- once a posting is more than few days old viewership stars to tail off. (Though that, too, is a function of whether it's still on the front page of the site ... one could regard the front page of a blog as analogous to "today's" news in a newspaper.)

Maybe one could also consider being Dugg on Digg et al to be like a news event itself? I.e. you have a blog posting that was totally ignored for months, then when Digg finds it, it produces a cascade of traffic as if the posting was, in essence, new. But then it tails off in the same was as if it were a piece of news posted for the first time on the front page of the New York Times.

So being ‘hit upon’ by someone like Digg is like a refresh button for your article or post? It’s lifetime gets reset to zero and the graph still applies.

Perhaps republishing is a better analogy: It’s as though a second edition has been issued (maybe with a new front cover if you’ve redesigned your site in the meantime).

Good point.