Googled and YouTubed

Of course, the other big story of the weekend was the appearance of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live, which Sunday morning pundits described as likely to be frequently "Googled and YouTubed." As I've noted here and here, the show has used public interest in politics as a way to drum up viewership, often through online video rather than through traditional broadcast or cable channels. The comments about the Palin segment being "Googled and YouTubed" the next day point to two realities of this new hybrid media form: 1) viewers still aren't trained to go to network websites or websites for shows directly, and 2) viewers who don't stay up for late night television are now counting on search engines to find footage rather than digitally recording shows in a new form of "time shifting." The latter fact is particularly interesting, given the legal history of the time shifting argument in copyright law in the Sony Betamax case.