Eoin Purcell's Blog

I referenced a post by Robert Young at Gigaom earlier this week and he comes up again as he highlights the role of search in video and the need for Hollywood to be on the ball:

As more and more videos go online with every passing day, people will increasingly link and point to the ones they like, just like we do with text today. This will give Google the exact same opportunity with video as it had with text… they can unleash PageRank to index and aggregate video links with high popularity, relevancy, precision and recall. To a large extent, Google can just sit tight and do nothing, as it’s the people and the natural momentum of the web that will do all the heavy lifting to make this happen. Wayne Gretzky would be proud… Google already knows where the hockey puck is heading and it’s just waiting there with a clear shot at the goal.

I completely agree with Robert and he has stated almost exactly the same terms as I did for book publishers. The truth is that the danger Google poses to all content is extreme. I’ll leave the last words with Robert:

So going back to the original question… should Hollywood fear Google? The long answer is that the probability of Google becoming the dominant gatekeeper to video will be directly correlated to the amount of hyperlinks people generate over time. The short answer is… it’s inevitable

Filed under: Books, Business, Future of Books, Future of Publishing, Business