Youtube doesn’t really do anything new. It it just the ‘delivery boy’ of online video. But how about this innovation? This is similar to what I was trying to do in my own work 5 years ago with milkbar.com.au. It is what you call ‘hypertextual video’ in that it allows the user to embed links within the video and link between and within the video. Pretty nifty huh? In my own work, I used oral history recording and indexed them according to 4 analytical themes. I am not completely sure how this system is going to work, but I can’t wait until it is released next month. (Thanks to Techcrunch for the link)
The keystone feature here is the ability to add tags and comments tied to particular points in a video. Those tags are then searchable, so if I want to find the particular point in one of my videos that I tagged “touchdown,” that’s easy to do. I can also have a conversation with other users regarding a particular moment in a video and choose to embed the video on another site in it’s entirety or only from a particular point I select. While users can link to particular points in a Google Video as of last month, that’s easier and is just the beginning in Viddler
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