One of the supporting experiments for the Big Bang theory is the isotropic cosmic microwave background radiation. It is the residual energy for our universe existing the way it does as a system. What of the internet? It is a complex system with all sorts of network effects. Does it have an isotropic background energy or activity level? With the change over to the new software system for South Sea Republic there is some data to explore that question.
South Sea Republic went onto the new software about a month ago. The previous software, scoop, did not record page views for each article. I could have added it in, but didn't. SSRBlog does store page views, it is how the 'most popular' article is determined at the foot of each page.
The interesting thing is that only the most recent articles have page views from regular users. The rest of the page views should be a mix of google/yahoo/ask searches, spam attempts; and bots, crawlers, spiders, etc looking at pages.
Which gives these two interesting graphs. The first is page views versus articles where the articles are in numeric and creation order.
Round about 841 is where the software change over occurred so that is the normal energy of South Sea Republic's day to day activity. Prior to that should be the background or residual energy for a website on the outer rim of the blogosphere's popularity.
There appears to be some consistent activity between about 221 and 821, but before that it drops off to one and is far less consistent.
The second graph is with the views ordered largest to smallest. Ignore the x-axis labeling, that is an artefact of how I sorted the dataset.
This graph looks logarithmic in character, definitely isn't linear. This graph also shows where the activity drops off to zero which suggests if there is residual activity it is in a timeframe and doesn't include older (greater than two years) content.
Does the internet have a background activity or energy? Undoubtedly IMO. Not sure these graphs really prove it though. We would expect a base 'activity' or energy, but the graph line is more logarithmic than hitting a flat base point which is greater than zero. Maybe too much noise, or maybe just too small a sample, or maybe SSR is too far flung on the outer galaxy's rural arm.
It may mean that the (uniform) background energy only reaches back as much as one or two years, and isn't isotropic.
The second graph is with the views ordered largest to smallest. Ignore the x-axis labeling, that is an artefact of how I sorted the dataset.
This graph looks logarithmic in character, definitely isn't linear. This graph also shows where the activity drops off to zero which suggests if there is residual activity it is in a timeframe and doesn't include older (greater than two years) content.
Does the internet have a background activity or energy? Undoubtedly IMO. Not sure these graphs really prove it though. We would expect a base 'activity' or energy, but the graph line is more logarithmic than hitting a flat base point which is greater than zero. Maybe too much noise, or maybe just too small a sample, or maybe SSR is too far flung on the outer galaxy's rural arm.
It may mean that the (uniform) background energy only reaches back as much as one or two years, and isn't isotropic. 
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