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Weekly News Digest
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May 11, 2021 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today. For other up-to-the-minute news, check out ITI’s Twitter account: @ITINewsBreaks.
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LLRX.com Studies Global Web Trends
Paul X. McCarthy and Marian-Andrei Rizoiu write the following in “We Spent Six Years Scouring Billions of Links, and Found the Web Is Both Expanding and Shrinking” for LLRX.com:The online world is continuously expanding—always aggregating more services, more users and more activity. Last year, the number of websites registered on the “.com” domain surpassed 150,000,000. However, more than a quarter of a century since its first commercial use, the growth of the online world is now slowing down in some key categories. We conducted a multi-year research project analysing global trends in online diversity and dominance. Our research, published today in Public Library of Science, is the first to reveal some long-term trends in how businesses compete in the age of the web. We saw a dramatic consolidation of attention towards a shrinking (but increasingly dominant) group of online organisations. So, while there is still growth in the functions, features and applications offered on the web, the number of entities providing these functions is shrinking. … The authority, influence and visibility of the top 1,000 global websites (as measured by network centrality or PageRank) is growing every month, at the expense of all other sites. … The web started as a source of innovation, new ideas and inspiration—a technology that opened up the playing field. It’s now also becoming a medium that actually stifles competition and promotes monopolies and the dominance of a few players. Our findings resolve a long-running paradox about the nature of the web: does it help grow businesses, jobs and investment? Or does it make it harder to get ahead by letting anyone and everyone join the game? The answer, it turns out, is it does both. For more information, read the article.
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Brandi Scardilli
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