The New York Times reports on research by Albert-Laslo Barabasi (author of Linked) that suggests that news stories published online have a long shelf life - a half-life of 36 hours . According to Barabasi this goes against traditioal ideas of how people use the internet which would predict a shorter half-life of between 2-4 hours.
News stories move quickly through a website - perhaps appearing on the front page, then a sub-section of the site and then to the sites archives where they can only be accessed from direct searches or by people following links from external sites. Websites that feature in news stories will experience a peak of visitation shortly after publication and decay quickly (no surprizes there then). However, such stories will continue to bring a trickle of visitors for weeks and months afterwards, and of course any embedded links in the news items will continue to bring search engine benefit.
A PDF of the paper by Barabasi et al is available from Fifteen Minutes of Fame.
