del.icio.us bookmark wordcount
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

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.