Paper Info
Title
Characterization of the evolution of a news Web site
Abstract
The Web has become a ubiquitous tool for distributing knowledge and information and for conducting businesses. To exploit the huge potential of the Web as a global information repository, it is necessary to understand its dynamics. These issues are particularly important for news Web sites as they are expected to provide fresh information on current world events to a potentially large user population. This paper presents an experimental study aimed at characterizing and modeling the evolution of a news Web site. We focused on the MSNBC Web site as it is a good representative of its category in terms of structure, news coverage and popularity. Specifically, we analyzed how often and to what extent the content of this site changed and we identified models describing its dynamics. The study has shown that the rate of page creations and updates was characterized by some well defined patterns that varied as a function of time of day and day of week. On the contrary, the content of individual pages changed to a different extent. Most updates involved a very small fraction of their content, whereas very few were more extensive and spread over the whole page. By taking into accounts all these aspects, we derived analytical models able to accurately capture and reproduce the evolution of the news Web site.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1016/j.jss.2008.04.038
Journal of Systems and Software
Keywords
Field
DocType
fresh information,global information repository,experimental study,different extent,news web site,individual page,characterization of web content,msnbc web site,web dynamics,models of news web sites,news coverage,page creation,whole page
Time of day,Population,World Wide Web,Computer science,Popularity,Global information,Exploit,Web site
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
81
12
The Journal of Systems & Software
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
3
0.43
13
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Maria Carla Calzarossa17011.31
Daniele Tessera212314.97