Download relaxation dynamics on the WWW following newspaper publication of URL

We describe an experiment on the dynamical response of the internaut population surfing the World-Wide-Web to a Dirac-like perturbation, specifically how the popularity of a web site evolves and relaxes as a function of time in response to the publication of a notice/advertisement in a newspaper. Following the publication of an interview, which contained our URL, by a journalist, we monitored the rate of downloads of our papers as a function of time and found it to obey a l/t(b) power law with exponent b = 0.58 +/- 0.03, This small exponent implies long-term memory and can be rationalized using the concept of persistence, which specifies how long a relaxing dynamical system remains in a neighborhood of its initial configuration. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.