delicious’ ‘toread’ word count
19Feb09
How long does an article have to be for people to bookmark it as ‘toread’ ? Here is a graph that tries to answer that question. I have taken 1500 most recent bookmarks under the tag ‘toread’ from delicious. I have then retrieved webpage for every single bookmark and calculated word count after stripping out HTML tags.
The graph plots log(wordcount) on y-axis and url index on x-axis. The normal distribution seems to start at 2.3, i.e. 230 words. 230 also has the first big spike when plotted on a histogram for word counts below 2000. But never the less, 230 seems too short an article to be bookmarked for later reading.
I wonder if many of the shorter ones are in fact short blog abstracts that link to longer pdf articles, etc? So the thing to be read may be longer than the saved link, perhaps?