About me: Software architect, Web Aficionado, Cloud Computing Fanboy, Geek Entrepreneur, Speaker, Co-founder and CTO of InfoQ.com, Writing also about NoSQL on the myNoSQL blog
Seeing this application left me speechless.
It is not much I can tell about it other than data visualization on steroids. Watch and enjoy:
Now, I am pretty sure you would like to play with it yourself, so here it goes: Tag Galaxy by Stan Schroeder.
I have published this video also on my Romanian blog koolapp: web-ul viitorului. web de calitate (Koolapp: web for the future. quality web) as an exemplification of smart or just nice data visualization models.
In a time where rich media is used everywhere, Loic Le Meur's idea of creating video comments is starting to get a lot of traction.
Replace traditional text based comments with video.
I have been talking about Seesmic, a company whose founder is Loic Le Meur, in a post where I was remarking that more and more content is produced in video format. Loic's bet is that the traditional text comments can be replaced by short videos where the person replying is expressing his thoughts on camera. Seesmic currently provides a WordPress plugin and plans on distributing plugins for more blogging systems.
One of the first sites that added this feature was TechCrunch, but at that moment I have thought that this decision was based on the fact that Mike Arrington has invested in Seesmic.
However, as crazy as this idea seemed originally, people like Jason Calacanis and Alexis Bonte are starting to praise it.
Today I'm glad to say I was 100% wrong about Seesmic. I still hate the name, but I love where he has taken it. Video comments on blogs are brilliant.
Alexis uses the "100%, 40%, 10% rule" to explain why video comments, even if sometimes difficult to produce, are are a good idea.
While I do love rich media content (just check my site InfoQ.com where we've been using rich media for quite a while) and find it refreshing, I am still concerned by a couple of aspects of video content for which we are lacking some important tools:
Should Microsoft and Yahoo stop fighting for the search market and just leave it in Google's hands?
Microsoft is dropping the Live Book Search, but launches Live Search Cashback. Where does Microsoft want to be positioned in the search market?
This whole discussion started when Tim O'Reilly has published in a blog post the following advice:
my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn't. That is, unless Microsoft makes you so good a deal for your search assets that you just can't say no. But either way, let yourself be quit of the destructive competition and focus on adding real value for your users.
My advice to Microsoft: outsource your search to Google too!
In reply, Mike Arrington is raising quite a few good points
- We are just getting started in search.
There are so many areas on search that remain to be conquered. Semantic search. Real language/AI search. The deep web. Media search.- Search monopoly and a healthy internet are mutually exclusive.
- [...] the CPC (cost per click) model is flawed, but in Google’s favor because it puts fraud risk inefficiently on the advertisers, who have no way of controlling it at the search engine level. CPA (cost per action) models work much better, but Google has done little more than test them.
Not far ago, I was also expressing my concerns related to video content search, even if there are quite a few contenders on this market.
In the following comments and new Tim's post, both have finally agreed that Tim's original advise was not about leaving Google approach to search unchallenged, but rather something that sounds more like Seth Godin's Purple Cow: instead of playing the catch up role, Microsoft and Yahoo should be investing their money and energy into researching something new, worthy and remarkable.
I also think that Tim O'Reilly opinions were triggered by the Microsoft's attempts to monetize search through the introduction of Microsoft Live Search Cashback, a new service on which the opinions are quite disputed right now.
However, there are signs that Microsoft is starting to look differently at the search market, as it has currently dropped the Live Search Books project (which was a reaction to Google's Book Search).
People are now looking for the videos in search. It’s gone from serendipitously finding videos or someone forwarding it to you, to actively going out and searching for it. (Bill Tancer)
After looking at a couple of video content sites I have expressed a couple of personal concerns related to this type of content:
so I have decided to look what solutions are available at this moment. I have put together a list of the major solutions:
blinkx, which claims to be the world's largest and most advanced video search engine, explains what is needed to achieve good indexing results while working on video content:
blinkx listens to the sound track using speech-to-text technology, looks at the images on screen using advanced video analytics, and reads other information embedded into the file by using media-analysis plug-ins to extract, for example, closed captioning. In this way, blinkx is processing as much information as possible to enable both extremely accurate search, and more advanced operations such as automatic hyperlinking of related content or implicit query, which understands the content a user is producing and viewing.
Most of the above video search engines (those that are not directly hosting video content) have developed partnership networks with some of the most well known video sites, but I guess the next step would be to have their technologies adopted or plugged directly into these so that the search can be performed on site.
In case I have missed any of the existing video search engines, please leave a comment and I will update the above list.
Companies don't seem to be worried by the YouTube market share and they are launching new video related products every day.
Not so long ago, we have heard from Seesmic about video-based comments that comes in the form of a Wordpress plugin and their plans to provide similar plugins for Moveable Type and Typepad.
We also have video for intellectuals provided by FORA.tv 
:
and BigThink 
with their short very topic focused videos:
One thing that I liked on FORA.tv was the possibility to watch either the whole video or just the Highlights, an approach that is somehow addressing one of my main concerns related to video content
(This video for intellectuals/smart people tagline sounds like something I have heard about in the .ro space too)
I must also mention the online TV guides with video: MeeVee
(unfortunately, I've had to spend some time trying to find a program that was really available, so I must confess that I wasn't too impressed by their services) and also the video on demand solutions like Sezmi 
, which "combines traditional TV content, movies and internet video".
Last, but not least, there are all those products offering new approaches for monetizing video content, but these will be covered some other time
While I'm most definitely loving rich media content, I am still having a couple of concerns related to video-based content:
About me: Software architect, Web Aficionado, Cloud Computing Fanboy, Geek Entrepreneur, Speaker, Co-founder and CTO of InfoQ.com, Writing also about NoSQL on the myNoSQL blog
