Oct 06
4
Video Search
I just got off a Skype call with a friend in Calgary, Paul….
Paul runs a small search optimization company. And he thinks a lot about how things work and why.
We were talking about the changing habits of people with regard to media consumption and the move away from TV to internet. And the fact that there is an exponential growth in not just the amount of content that is now “out there” but also that the same content may be described differently by different people, via title, tags and a whole lot of other data. All this is making it more and more frustrating for ordinary people to find the content that they want…
One of the solutions is to have intelligent agents to find that content for you. Back in the early days of radio these intelligent agents were of course called DJ's. That was before radio proprieters discovered through research that audiences tended to only have a 20 minute engagement with the radio station and that they wanted to hear the songs that they liked again and again and again. Therefore a playlist could be less than 20 records long. Hence pop radio.
Now it is a case of back to the future. We need to find a way through the dross. We also need to find a way through YouTube. As Paul said to me: he is an avid amateur magician and he likes to look for new tricks in YouTube. Problem is that if you search on 'magic', your search results bring up Magic Johnston too…
So how do we get to a place where we can exclude some kinds of content and only include others? How do I get to find latest postings and episodes of Stephen Colbert and exclude copies of material that is more than 3 months old?
I think that these questions about how we actually start to usefully put together programming using the resources that are now at hand are going to become more and more important. -