More on modern media...

[active_apathy]

Cheap Timeline

11:00am: Irwin stabbed by stingray
12:00pm: Irwin declared dead
3:00pm: Police report released
5:30pm: Google News indexes 301 articles from Internet news sources
6:30pm: Google News indexes 502 articles from Internet news sources
9:30pm: Google News indexes 854 articles from Internet news sources
12:00am: Google News indexes 1022 articles from Internet news sources, all about the death

The way information behaves in the modern world is, I think, both scary and exciting. I'd be interested to compare the growth in articles for this story with the number of stories Google knows about next time something happens.

Comments

[leila82.livejournal.com]

It's scary, isn't it? And meanwhile, the television media is left scrambling, even six, seven hours later. At least, over here they are. Which is interesting, considering the various stations manage to update their websites fairly quickly; they just have trouble updating their news anchors.

When the train bombings in India happened over the summer, I definitely had to rely on Google news for updates, but I thought that the news was updated fairly quickly (we knew more about what was happening than our family members actually in Bombay, which was saying quite a lot). Didn't pay attention to how many articles they indexed, though.

[maggiebloome.livejournal.com]

Hay you got metaquoted! That means you really are officiall Back To The Intarwebs!

[laurenmitchell.livejournal.com]

By comparison, Google News has 3 articles relating to the death of Colin Thiele.