Google and Current TV Channel (http://current.tv/) on DirecTV

You may use this content (better still, argue with me!), but please cite my ideas as (c) 2005, Dr. Bruce Klopfenstein.

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My Cleveland Indians are driving me to various sources of information from XM Satellite Radio (carries the local radio broadcast of games), to MLB.com which had feeds from Chicago of both television feeds (White Sox and Indians) as well as both local radio broadcasts. Once again, this "video-on-demand" picture looked great on both RealPlayer and Windows Media Player (although the latter forced control bars above and below the content, hiding the game information at the top of the screen (score, count, runners on base) and the bottom of the screen (batter, average, miscellaneous information).

Last night I was tooling around DirecTV while listening to the Indians' postgame show on XM satellite radio (they go well into the local call-in show after the game too, pure heaven for a displaced Indians fan). I found a channel with the "Google" logo and it was showing something like a spider web of most recently clicked (video?) news stories on Google, here on DirecTV. Before I knew it there was a home grown documentary of a young man from Wisconsin returning to Mississippi to try to find his grandmother in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Update: I just saw current.tv promoted on the Google channel. 24 September 2005

I assume the video camera was home brew but am not sure about the editing. Apart from that, this personal journey and his grandmother's stories of riding out the storm in her pantry (her "locker") were more compelling than most of the polished network newscast presentations of such victims. It was what it was, a "real life" incident and a grandmother telling her story to her concerned grandson without the intrusion of a professional news gathering crew. Amazing, but I decided to go back and bathe in the glow of another Indians win.

Google is becoming the next behemoth and I wonder how long it will be before hackers turn their attention on Google. I'm not searching for the research to approach this, but my gut tells me that for many hackers the bigger they are, the more tempting the target. Perhaps if Google maintains a sense of humility in all that it is doing it will avoid the disruptions of Microsoft attackers. I suspect we will soon, very soon, see Google coming under fire from various quarters. It seems the inevitable path in the U.S. when one entity seems to get too much power and control. I'll let the sociologists explain this (or why I may be dead wrong).

That Google has a channel depicting "most clicked [video] news stories" would seem to be a peephole into the future, not just for Google but for all media. As all content is digitized, compressed, and found (versus made available) on the Internet, we will continue to move toward a viewer-controlled environment of television choice, which is my assumption.