Analysis of News-On-Demand Characteristics and Client Access Patterns

World Wide Web services are continuing to grow along with the number of clients connecting to the Internet and the transfer rates of their connections. News is one of the main areas of usage of clients today. It is also an area which has not received much attention from the research community. In this thesis, we investigate several aspects of news on demand (NoD) services on the Internet today. We analyze log files of a news server and a streaming server from Norway’s largest online newspaper Verdens Gang (VG). Our focus is on the content in a NoD environment, users behavior with the content, and object popularity in terms of both news articles and streaming objects. The most central topics we investigate are types of files on these servers, size distribution, access and interaction patterns, object lifetime, and if the Zipf popularity distribution applies in this scenario.