30 minutes after the Olympic result is announced (London won, yay) and the ‘most-discussed news story right now’ on Technorati is ‘Boffins create zombie dogs’; the most popular tags on Flickr in the past 24 hours are all about 4th July, and top of Blogdex is a link to a blog called ‘fifthnail’.
There’s something wrong with this. Several times now I’ve gone online, in search of opinions and thoughts about current events and found nothing. The major news organisations updated their pages minutes after the announcement and we can read the sanitised text, but what are blogs if they’re not about alternative views, feelings, experiences. How is this event affecting people? I want pictures, views and first-hand accounts and I can’t believe nobody out there has posted anything yet, either in response to the result or from the build-up or even earlier.
What I’d like to see from Technorati or other blogosphere monitors is ‘London wins bid, now see what people are saying and photographing’. What I actually see is zombie dogs – apparantly that’s the most important story on people’s minds right now!?
The concept of pinging is interesting – blog author tells the Internet they have written something new. The implementation is challenging (Feedmesh sounds quite promising though), but when the infrastructure is sorted out the only bottlenecks to presenting genuinely current results will be the clock ticks of whatever processors sit, download and analyse the data, and the algorithms themselves.
I look forward to the day when a website on the Internet will tell me not only what’s happening right now, but what people think about it, what eyewitnesses have captured about it, and what else the Internet has to say about it. We’re certainly not there yet, but we’re surely getting there.