The Internet is not a television
August 14, 2007
In an age of YouTube, it seems that every website needs to have a little embedded video player, showing screencasts and interviews and recorded presentations. How neat. However: I just don’t have twenty minutes to watch a video just to get some piece of information I’m looking for. Ever.
Videos can’t be searched for key words. Skipping back and forth is an imprecise means of finding the information you want. I never do just one thing at a time, and videos by their nature demand full sensory attention: watch, listen, sit still.
I can see how screencasts can be useful for people who are new to a technology, say, and don’t have the means to get direct hands-on experience. A good presentation can be good on video too. But please, if there’s actual information to be presented, make it text and images first, and video as a supplementary extra for those who can be bothered.
August 14, 2007 at 4:23 pm
O I don’t agree, I sew (and sometimes draw and sometimes chop vegetables) and watch tv. In fact, tv is best if you can do something useful with your hands while watching it
It might be that I don’t have a working short wave radio just now though…
But you might also be interested in this story from slashdot:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/12/2325218
the most interesting stuff is in the comments, about IPv4 vs IPv6. Recent internet usage (ie video) is fast outgrowing the current internet protocol?
August 16, 2007 at 9:50 am
Ahh well…the internet indeed is not television, thank goodness. However, I think your evaluation of video as a medium of information exchange is based on ideas of what video has been, rather than what it should be:
Video should be precisely searchable and navigable by location of text within the transcript.
Video search results need only include enough contextual surroundings of the search matter, in order to provide meaning to the researsher.
In other words, video should be easily parsable, as well as searchable and navigable by the text and or concepts it contains.
All of this is possible and happening now–if only in small projects, but it is happening.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater though. Video is great, it just needs to incorporate some of the things that we developers have come to know and love about the textual, and contextual internet.
Afterall, won’t it be great when we can parse a variety of video libraries, tag their contents with ontologies, run a reasoner over them–and create new video mashups based on reasoning algorithms, archetypal pattern formation, and guided story development?
The possibilities for video involvement in human knowledge engineering are only in their infancy.
Don’t hate: video…but if you have to hate, hate the way you’ve experienced it.
August 16, 2007 at 10:36 am
Interesting post
What about adding html page around the video with the video transcript as text and keywords to search for the information?
September 8, 2007 at 8:10 pm
This is my first post
just saying HI
September 10, 2007 at 6:56 pm
Video really bites for transferring basic information. I don’t even want the transcript, because people speak in incomplete sentences and don’t think about what they say as much as they (should) think about what they write. And podcasts are even worse….