World Cup Score on Google News: Blogs 1,000, Old Media zip

World Cup Score on Google News: Blogs 1,000, Old Media zip? Read on...

One quiet revolution on Google News and Google Trends and sparked by World Cup Soccer interest is the thousands of web pages on World Cup Soccer on blogs you've never heard of that pop up on the news side of Google Trends.

Google Trends is a sub-product of Google News, the Google online product that lists and aggregates news from news sites and blog sites each second. Last year, by observation, Google News favored traditional news organizations with websites. But, starting last fall, and continuing at an increasing rate, standard blog content has made its way over to Google News and on the news side of Google Trends.

Google Trends results have been divided into two sections: news on the left and blogs on the right. It was easy to tell the difference as news sites like The Washington Post showed up on the left and blogs on the right. But as of The 2010 World Cup all that changed.

Googling "World Cup live streaming" produced a number of websites never seen before by this blogger, like BigNewsBiz (a press release) or NewsBoll, or Flash Briefings and Fishabble, or Daily World Trends, all blogs and all in the main Google News area.

In other words, their content is not relegated to the "blog" area. Personally, this is a good thing.

It's good because it means that Google understands something this blogger has talked to execs there about: the need to "unlock" Google News and make blogs more a part of the standard news cycle.

I openly stated to Google that doing this was the only way to change the culture of traditional news organizations and force them to become more "tech" than journalist. That is, to learn Internet webpage engineering and develop an interest in coding for web pages and for search systems. Also, for the organizations to become more a part of the tech culture.

While "unlocking" Google News will certainly cause a decrease in online revenue from traffic to conventional news sites, the development will make them stronger in the end. The days of news companies like News Corporation and Rupert Murdoch threatening to pull their content from Google are over. Such an action only harms Rupert Murdoch, not Google.

The World Cup Soccer games show that; finding traditional news sites in some searches is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But then, when one Googled "World Cup live", the San Francisco Chronicle blog stood at the top of the search result in Google News and on the first page as of this writing at 8 AM PDT.

That was my doing.

Stay tuned.