If you are writing for the Web, for an online journalism Web site, are your writings staying for the eternity?

It does not seem so:

A team of scientists from Hungary and the United States has found that the majority of online news items have a lifetime of just 36 hours1. As reporters have always suspected, yesterday’s news is stale, and the day before’s news is invisible.

How to fight this behaviour? A possible answer:

Stefan Bornholdt, a physicist at the University of Bremen in Germany who has studied the statistics of online behaviour, suggests that news outlets could improve those figures by making story listings reactive, so that the most popular stories get pushed to the top automatically.

Or, maybe, you could launch and facilitated discussion of the news story with the readers. I am thinking to Slashdot.

news @ nature.com - Life is short in online news - How long did it take you to find this story?