Public attention to new technologies typically arrives years after their first public emergence — yet this lag has rarely been measured systematically. This work introduces the Zorthex Public Attention Diffusion Lag (L), an empirical indicator defined as the number of months between the first public emergence of a technology (seminal paper or commercial launch) and the first sustained mainstream peak of public search interest, operationalised on Google Trends with locked thresholds (≥25/100, sustained ≥3 months). The framework formalizes step-by-step measurement, robustness checks across alternative definitions, and statistical comparison via Mann–Whitney U test. Applied to a small, explicitly biased dataset of n=10 technologies spanning scientific, slow-burn, and product/commercial regimes, the framework produces descriptive observations consistent with cluster structures previously assumed but not rigorously measured. A figure visualizes a forthcoming v1.1 dataset extension (n=15) for transparency, while v1.0 statistical conclusions are based exclusively on the n=10 dataset. The document explicitly catalogues five sources of bias — survival, selection, proxy, sample size, definitional subjectivity — and is released as a preliminary, replicable research artifact under CC-BY 4.0, with full code and data publicly available. Zorthex does not claim universal laws; it provides a method that others can replicate, criticize, and extend.
Renato Santi (Fri,) studied this question.