Evolution of Internet Information Consumption through Bookmarking

As internet usage has grown recently, it has become important in our lives and has affected the way that we act and think. Particularly, people today consume and produce large amounts of media on the internet and in ways very different from before. A common complaint about this change, however, is that we experience information overload, with status updates constantly coming in from social networks, such as Twitter or Facebook, in small bursts relating to minor events. Some claim that there’s a cost to this continuous flow of relatively unimportant information: we no longer pay attention to the big ideas or big movements in the world because we’re stuck in the minutia [3] [6]. For this project, we look at information consumption on the internet through social bookmarking usage over time to understand how people’s attention and behavior has changed with the internet. We examine the number and age of bookmarks to particular URLs to understand the properties of usage. We also present an extension to preferential attachment that attempts to account for the time-sensitive nature of bookmarks.