John Battelle, renowned search luminary and Google specialist, discusses his vision for the future of television, which he says will be impacted by social networking and search technology. In a bit of
a rant, Battelle talks about being in a gym locker room watching the outcome of a murder trial live on Fox News. The judge was about to hand out his sentence to the accused man, and a split screen on
the TV showed the faces of the judge, the man, and a room of several of his victims. The bottom headline said something about how a man was about to be condemned for killing a 14-year-old girl. He
said everyone in the locker room was glued to the television, captivated by the judge's apparent struggle with determining whether or not to send this man to die. Instead of watching the
outcome--Battelle said he couldn't bear to--he had a vision of the future of television: imagine what that event would be like if it were instantly searchable? What if there were a TelevisionRank or
something that would notice, in real time, what people were paying attention to--kind of like how Yahoo places an RSS feed of the most viewed stories at the top of the My Yahoo home page--updated
continuously throughout the day? Not only is that possible, Battelle says, it's probable we'll see that in the next five years--a mash of Technorati with Nielsen, YouTube and Comcast.
Read the whole story at John Battelle's Searchblog »
