I’m a political junkie in my spare time, so I have the Sotomayor confirmation hearings playing on C-SPAN as I write today. But while I heard some of Lindsey Graham’s surprisingly honest and heartfelt opening statement, I missed a chunk of it. Alas, I don’t have a DVR, so I couldn’t just hit “rewind.”
First I tried to find it using Twitter Search. That wasn’t much help, as it was mostly filled with people talking about one particular quip made by the senator. I tried OneRiot, but was presented with similar Twitter results and no real-time video or transcripts. Google linked me to Graham’s Wikipedia entry, as well as to the official Senate home page — plus some older videos on YouTube. Bing was similarly useless.
I finally found the video by hunting around on C-SPAN’s site and finding a DVR-esque video stream of the confirmation proceedings that let me go back and find just what I wanted to see — but I had to hunt for it. It wasn’t something a search engine could have found for me. Now that some time has passed, of course, the video has been excerpted, making it much easier to find. That’s not really “real-time,” though. That’s just “recent.”
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