Brittany Murphy, Google Results and the Live Web

Waking up this morning I heard the news about Brittany Murphy’s passing via my wife and the radio station which blurted out “unofficial” reports from TMZ.com.

So I went and “googled” it and sure enough the search confirmed the story. But as I scanned through the numerous results I saw a new window embedded in the page I had not noticed before which was continuously scrolling with updates…

The Brittany Murphy story was breaking before my eyes...

On further research I discover that Google had announced on the 7th Dec 2009 a new feature that provides a “dynamic stream” of real-time content from such sites as Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca and of course Twitter.

What you get to see now, immediately after conducting a search, is live updates combined with news headlines and blog posts as they are published – sort of like a news ticker but specific to a topic in oppose to covering a broad range of breaking stories.

And I must say it’s kind of consuming as you read the articles being published on various sites specific to your topic as well as the opinions of the netizens out their via their twitter posts and blogs.

Of course it’s not going to happen on all search results just yet. I tried typing in “ASIC Social Networking” as research fo the story I am currently writing and got nothing - which is what I kind of expected. But to give it a test have a look at “Google Trends“ and by clicking on a hot topic it will bring you to a search results page with the new real-time feature.

Now the “live web” is nothing new because the Internet and it’s ability to update quicker than traditional news gathering organisations has been “Live” for some time. Again using Ms Murphy’s passing as an example, it was updated on Wikipedia and IMDb before I saw the Australian press run with the story on their websites. But clearly Google aims to take this one step further, not only consolidating the live web in one place – but actually giving it life…

Google Labs are now testing what they call the "Living Stories" project

The “Living Stories project” is an experiment in presenting news and is designed specifically for the online environment. The project has been developed by Google in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post.

What you get is news all in one place allowing you to quickly navigate between news articles, opinion pieces and features. Google claims it’s easy to explore with an evolving summary of current developments as a well as an interactive timeline. And it’s personalised with updates to the story highlighted each time you come back with the older news summarized.

All of this is interesting when you again consider Murdoch’s push to charge for online content. I have written a previous article on whether the Internet should be pay per viewand the impact of Murdoch’s play vs Google’s search results. But in hindsight I think that article had the wrong focus.

The question Murdoch now faces is not comparing revenue vs loss of traffic via search results but are they just too late in attempting to charge for revenue at all. I say this because one must now question HOW RELEVANT IS A SINGLE NEWS SOURCE considering we have access to real-time data aggregation of breaking stories and ongoing coverage of relevant topics. And this will become an even more relevant discussion when video updates get added into the mix – don’t forget Google owns YouTube.

So I’ll leave you with this question – Are you going to pay for the views of a single publication or editor when a multitude of stories and opinions can be served up to free of charge so may form your own? It’s the very question I think media organisations could be betting their companies on in the future…and you have the answer.