What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [55]
Life is live
Just as Google and the rest of us start to get our hands around currency—finding the latest—the web speeds up even more. The internet is going live.
I have broadcast live video to the world on the internet from my Nokia phone—no satellite truck, no microwave hookups, no broadcast tower or cable company, just me and my phone, live. The next time a big news event happens—a 9/11 in New York, a 7/7 in London, or an earthquake in China—witnesses will have the ability not only to capture but also to share with the world what they see as they see it.
Live video from witnesses will have a profound impact on news networks. They have begged witnesses to send in their tips, photos, and videos—after the fact. When a student at Virginia Tech University went on a shooting spree in 2007, a fellow student recorded the sound of the shots with his camera-phone. He sent the video to CNN, which took more than an hour to vet it and get it on-air and online. If that student had been broadcasting using a phone on live video services such as Qik.com and Flixwagon.com, he wouldn’t have sent anything to CNN but would have been sharing the video on his own. CNN’s choice would be whether to link to the student’s broadcast or embed it on its web page or in its broadcast. It could not delay the decision, for then the live video would not have been live anymore.
When China’s Sichuan Province suffered its horrendous earthquake in May 2008, people who felt it firsthand shared their experience via Twitter, a microblogging platform that enables users to send and receive 140-character-long updates to friends who follow them on the web or via short-message services on their mobile phones. Twitter was cofounded by Evan Williams, one of the creators of the company that built Blogger, which revolutionized publishing. Now he has taken publishing mobile and live. I was shocked that this service, just two years old, had spread to China—but then, I, too, sometimes forget the internet’s ability to spread in an instant, distance be damned. What isn’t shocking is that people in the quake zone would use Twitter to update friends. That’s what it is made for. If I were going through a quake, I’d want to tell family and friends that I was safe, wouldn’t you?
Twitter is becoming the canary in the news coal mine. Developers at the BBC and Reuters picked up on Twitter’s potential and created applications to monitor it for news catchwords such as “earthquake” and “evacuate.” Journalists search Twitter to find witnesses to interview and quote. During the Sichuan quakes, Twitter user casperodj wrote, “CREEPY! while i’m typing, there’s an aftershock hitting!” News organizations also search Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and blogs to find photos and videos that witnesses record, long before professional photographers arrive.
Imagine the problem the live web presents to Google: How can it search for and find things as they are happening? Oddly, Wikipedia can be quicker at updating current information than otherwise-speedy Google. It carried the news of Tim Russert’s and Paul Newman’s deaths before major news sites. During momentous events such as the 2004 tsunami, Wikipedians maintained entries with up-to-the-minute news. In the John Henry duel of man and machine, it’s nice to see man winning one. Perhaps we need more human-powered means of recognizing what’s new and what’s hot—that is what the search service Mahalo contends and that is a core value of human-powered aggregator Digg. There is a business opportunity in finding currency—complementing Google’s completeness