Comments on: The Real-time Web May Kill the Radio Star — Unless Radio Toughens Up

By: Google Will Begin Adding Real-time Search Results in the Next Few Days « The Scholarly Kitchen

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:30:04 +0000

[...] I noted how the useful lifespan of news was shrinking to seconds with services like Google News and other feed-based and email alerting systems. Now, with the [...]

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:38:29 +0000

But if, as Schmidt notes, Google sends billions to news sources, then there’s an audience there as well (but apparently not one Google is willing to pay for).

Clearly that audience is not going there for immediate real-time news, and papers need to give up the idea that they’re still in this game (they lost to cable news decades ago). But they do have something of some apparent value to those billions of readers.

By: Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:04:56 +0000

I think it also shows how audiences aren’t commodities while news is. You have to pay for people, but news doesn’t last long enough.

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:51:05 +0000

This is a good example of Google paying for content:

“Google struck formal partnerships with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace to quickly bring updates from those services into its search index. The companies did not disclose terms of those deals, although a person briefed on the Twitter deal said Google made a large up-front payment.”

It’s interesting that they value what people are saying on sites like Twitter and Facebook enough to pay for it, but seem uninterested in “professional” journalism in the same way.

By: Kent Anderson

Kent Anderson — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:55:22 +0000

Apparently, Google crawled your response, then did this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/08/technology/companies/08google.html?_r=1&ref=technology. They're not giving up without a fight!

By: David Crotty

David Crotty — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:45:08 +0000

There's an argument to be made that Google has already lost the battle when it comes to real-time news, as the rate at which it spiders and updates is glacial compared to things like Twitter and Facebook. It's interesting to note that Google has paid for content in the past, setting up deals with Myspace and Twitter, and partnerships with movie and television studios on YouTube. It's a tacit admission that not all the traffic Google provides can readily be monetized by the recipient. Here though, the question is whether the content being offered (news) is of sufficient value for Google to pay as they have in other situations.

By: Joseph Esposito

Joseph Esposito — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:17:38 +0000

Allow me to be the first pedant to point out that the song lyrics say, “Video killed the radio star.” Schmidt says that video “didn’t kill the radio star.” He’s wrong, rhetorically and factually. The song also includes ominously, “We can’t rewind/We’ve gone too far.”

As Clay Shirky has remarked, NOTHING can save newspapers.