Imagine being back in grade school and you had someone you didn’t care for and you whispered into a friend’s ear, “I hate Joey”. The secret would eventually get out to your other 15 classmates and that was the extent of your ability to disseminate your thoughts. Even if you stood on your soap box and yelled that you hated Joey at the top of your lungs you were lucky to get another 15 people to hear you. Fast forward to 2009-2010. Instead of a negative thought about Joey, which today as back then would be protected under the first Amendment, what is the comment is defamatory i.e. “Joey is a drug addict and thief”. Open a twitter account, gain a marginal following and you can have your thoughts and opinions heard from New York to California. Wow…that is some soap box Google has provided. Real Time Search is a reality:
I’m not really sure what this means or how it will play out. Those of us who are viewed as authorities in our particular fields love it. Someone can whisper positive thoughts from their computer in New York and our clients in California will be beneficiaries. But what about the bad guys. Is Google going to enable some rogue person who has an axe to grind a public forum so large that it would surpass anyone’s wildest imagination.
You see, in the past in order to be heard you had to have a platform. You needed to be an authority of some sort i.e. The Wall Street Journal.
Today, power has been restored to the little guy. In fact, the viral nature of the net has given the individual such a large platform and so much power that large Corporation are stroking/catering to Bloggers in hopes that they not Blog/Tweet a negative word. Hopefully, the real time search platform works and the good will be praised and the bad will be eaten up for dinner. One thing I am certain of is everyone will be on there best behavior so as not to appear negatively in real time search on Google.
Lawyers who outsource their marketing, spam, and have a bunch of non-lawyers writing their content from India in order to gain top search results will eventually find that the power of public opinion will be above them ridiculing their marketing practices…in real time on Google.
