I’m currently reading other blogs related to the Flickr to Yahoo sale and saw that a little bit earlier Dave Winer linked to a screenshot of Google News showing that he had linked to the Yahoo sale to Flickr already and it wasn’t yet listed in Google news. Winer seemed a bit miffed that Scripting News wasn’t a Google News source:

Interesting that Google News doesn’t have this bit yet. Hey if you scanned Scripting News you would have a clue. Just an idea. ;->

This got me thinking: how long does it take for Google news to link to a breaking story? So I decided to run an actual experiment and see.

Since I’ve been a Blogcritic for over a year now — and Blogcritics is one of the growing number of blog Google News sources, I would go over and test how long it would take Google News to pick up the headline. I had to move quickly though, before another Blogcritic would be onto the story and posting the news ahead of the piece I submitted.

I reworked the last entry I posted here and made it sound a little bit more newsworthy (hopefully, anyway) and then I submitted to Blogcritics. This process took me about five minutes.

It took a couple minutes to filter to the front page of Blogcritics because the system there is cached and within a couple minutes it showed up in the Google News search. Google Search: flickr.

So the answer is that Google news can pick up a story from one of its sources literally within minutes of being posted.

One solution for Dave — in the interim of Scripting News not being a recognized source — might be to become a fellow Blogcritic and then he could help get stuff listed in Google news faster.

Just an idea.

Update: after I posted this, I see that Dave has already changed his original message to read the following instead:

I wonder how long before a non-blog source gets the story. And they would have had it sooner if they deigned to scan Scripting News.

Apparently, Winer’s position had been tempered from his initial reaction. Usually bloggers strikethru their original words published though when they add or update them. In this case, though, he deleted the text entirely as if it was never there. Hmm, I wonder why he would do that? I didn’t take a screenshot of his original text, but now this gets me wondering if there is a cache somewhere of the original words.

(Bloglines has one, see screencap here, and oddly enough it looks like he had a smiley that wasn’t there when I first encountered his post … this sort of alters the tone of his original post — so I just went and added the smiley that wasn’t there when I first encountered his blog)

Makes me look a bit foolish and inaccurate for quoting and linking to something that isn’t even on Dave’s site any more. Think I will screenshot Dave Winer quotes from now on, just to be on the safe side from this sometimes frenetic editing that he seems to be doing.

Guess this is what one would call dynamic news reporting.

Other bloggers writing about the Flickr to Yahoo sale

Jeremy Zawodny writes: “It’s such a relief to be able to talk openly about this.”

• Yahoo! buys Flickr
• Is it the blog or the blogger that holds subscribers?
• 29% of traffic sent to Audi from ad campaign came from blogs
• Happy 50th, Dave Winer
• Winer keeps banging drum against Google’s AutoLink feature
• Nolan says Winer is “stingy” with links — is he?