| Novelty and collective attention (2007) | |||||||||||||||
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| 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 one million users of an interactive website –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 stretchedexponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades. The problem of collective attention is at the heart of decision making and the spread of ideas, and as such it has been studied at the individual and small group level by a number of psychologists [1, 2] economists [3], and researchers in the area of marketing and advertising [5, 6, 7]. Attention also affects the propagation of information in social networks, determining the effectiveness of advertising and viral marketing [8]. And while | |||||||||||||||
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