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The dynamics of personal territories on the web

Published: 01 September 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we present a long-term study of user-centric Web traffic data collected in 2000--2002 and 2005--2006 from two large representative panels of French Internet users. Our work focuses on the dynamics of personal territories on the Web and their evolution between 2000 and 2006. At the session level, we distinguish four profiles of browsing dynamics in 2005--2006, and point out the growing dichotomy between straight routine sessions and exploratory browsing. At a global level, we observe that although each individual's corpus of visited sites is permanently growing, his browsing practices are structured around routine well-known sites which operate as links providers to new sites. We argue that this tension between the known and the unknown is constitutive of Web practices and is a fundamental property of personal Web territories.

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cover image ACM SIGWEB Newsletter
ACM SIGWEB Newsletter  Volume 2009, Issue Autumn
Sep. 2009
41 pages
ISSN:1931-1745
EISSN:1931-1435
DOI:10.1145/1592394
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 September 2009
Published in SIGWEB Volume 2009, Issue Autumn

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Author Tags

  1. browsing behaviors
  2. traffic analysis
  3. usage territories
  4. user-centric traffic data
  5. web usage mining

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