Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news

Re: Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news

Mathew Ingram — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:36:12 -0000

Thanks for the link, Melissa.

Re: Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news

Melissa — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 09:32:02 -0000

Hello,

Just wanted to let you know I linked to your blog in my column on CBSNews.com today. Thanks!

If you want to take a look, here's the link: http://www.cbsnews.com/stor...

Thanks,

Melissa

Re: Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news

Mathew Ingram — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 11:01:00 -0000

Agreed on the Google gerbils. But I think the Comedy Central thing is a little more than a "fun fact" and a fluke -- although it is both of those things as well, of course. I think the point is in your comment: it reminds us that anyone can report, and anyone can publish. It's no coincidence that right in the middle of the word "disintermediation" is the word "media" :-)

Re: Comedy Central first with Rumsfeld news

Rob Hyndman — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 10:46:23 -0000

Well, this is a little like arguing whether Kasparov or Big Blue is going to win the match, isn't it? Google is automated and Digg / Netscape rely on human filtering, so the issue is simply how fast the gerbils are running on the Google wheel and how many people are awake and posting to Digg / Netscape at the time? I'll go out on a limb here and even predict that Google's news spidering will get even faster in the future. Digg - a little, but likely not so much. Those Google gerbils, they never sleep, and they always win in the end.

Oh, and all Google has to do is post an AP feed and it wins this race? Hmmm. Me not get.

And as to Comedy Central, I agree it's a fun fact, but surely this is a fluke, yes? Someone happened to hear? So they "broke" it because they have a blog on which they can publish it? That's not really anything to hang a hat on, IMO. And even then, it looks like the info didn't come from Comedy Central staffers, but rather came from someone they brought in from the outside for a day - a "token conservative" - to help them blog the election, who had his own sources, and happened to hear this the very time he happened to be blogging at CC's Indecider blog.

Again, fun for sure, but not sure it means anything vis-a-vis CC vs. old news media. It probably just reminds us that anyone can report, and anyone can publish.