POLITICIANS know that quotes can take on a life of their own. Now a method for tracking utterances as they cycle through online media has been developed by a group of computer scientists.
It turns out that bloggers are rarely the first to publish a catchy quote, but instead lag behind traditional news media such as newspapers, with a typical quote being picked up by bloggers an average of 2.5 hours later.
Diffusion in the opposite direction is rare: just 3.5 per cent of quotes originated from blogs.
Jon Kleinberg of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and colleagues,…
