For those who haven’t heard, actress Brittany Murphy died today. I don’t watch too many movies these days, so most of her career is blank to me, but I did remember her from Little Black Book, a chick flick that a friend from high school and I saw back in the day.
I only semi-found out through Twitter. I was playing a few rounds of Mahjong when one of my followers pondered what would happen to Oh No They Didn’t, a celebrity gossip blog, if LiveJournal ever died. This prompted me to visit their page, and sure enough, Brittany Murphy’s reported death was there. It wasn’t trending yet on Twitter, much to my surprise, so naturally I had to get in before it trended and contribute to that and then watch Google’s live feed that afternoon and wait for someone to report on a source besides TMZ.
I hadn’t had a chance to test the live feed yet, and this was a good chance to test it. It works much better than Twitter’s for current events, especially with the release of news articles. I doubt that every single tweet about Brittany Murphy, whose name was terribly misspelled as Britney in the trending topics for most of the day, showed up in Google’s live feed because it wasn’t moving that quickly, but it does well. Google fetches news articles quickly, too, as we all know: I read the CNN article three minutes after it was posted to the Internet. This is what I thrive on: finding a story and digging to get to the root of it. Google has provided an excellent way to feed that thirst for current events.
Maybe I should be a journalist after all.