Abstract
The web can be regarded as an ecosystem of digital resources connected and shaped by collective successive behaviors of users. Knowing how people allocate limited attention on different resources is of great importance. To answer this, we embed the most popular Chinese web sites into a high dimensional Euclidean space based on the open flow network model of a large number of Chinese users’ collective attention flows, which both considers the connection topology of hyperlinks between the sites and the collective behaviors of the users. With these tools, we rank the web sites and compare their centralities based on flow distances with other metrics. We also study the patterns of attention flow allocation, and find that a large number of web sites concentrate on the central area of the embedding space, and only a small fraction of web sites disperse in the periphery. The entire embedding space can be separated into 3 regions(core, interim, and periphery). The sites in the core (1%) occupy a majority of the attention flows (40%), and the sites (34%) in the interim attract 40%, whereas other sites (65%) only take 20% flows. What’s more, we clustered the web sites into 4 groups according to their positions in the space, and found that similar web sites in contents and topics are grouped together. In short, by incorporating the open flow network model, we can clearly see how collective attention allocates and flows on different web sites, and how web sites connected each other.
Highlights
The excess of information makes us no longer read-but skim and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to juggle all the news sources and keep on top of things, which brings us to the law of information [1], stated first by Simon, “wealth of information creates a scarcity of attention” [2]
We exhibit the Chinese WWW ecosystem from a new perspective by using the collective flow data to better represent the connections between web sites
Open flow network and embed it into a high dimensional Euclidean space based on flow distance, through which each site can obtain a unique position
Summary
The excess of information makes us no longer read-but skim and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to juggle all the news sources and keep on top of things, which brings us to the law of information [1], stated first by Simon, “wealth of information creates a scarcity of attention” [2]. More and more scientists realize the attention crisis and try to find a better understanding of attention mechanism. Due to the limitation of measurement and data collection, very few quantitative works are proposed until the coming era of big data. The rapid development of social media provides us an unprecedented opportunity to know how PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0165240. The Atlas of Chinese World Wide Web Ecosystem The rapid development of social media provides us an unprecedented opportunity to know how PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0165240 November 3, 2016
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