Internet News

All-in-one for Searching Creative Commons

Search Creative Commons offers an all-in-one place entry point to materials that may be under a creative commons usage license. Enter search terms, and select a service - images: Flickr, Fotopedia, Google Images, Open Clip Art Library; media: Europeana, SpinXpress, Wikimedia Commons; music - Jamendo; and Google Web. Examine the query it constructs on the service - you should see limitations according to license.

Very good place to start your search for material that is under CC License.

Changes at Vimeo

Vimeo Gets Its First Facelift Since 2007, TechCrunch

Video sharing site, Vimeo, is rolling out a new design that puts the emphasis on making videos.

"There are a bunch of other new features, including improved search options, a page for viewing Creative Commons-licensed work, and the ability to upload multiple videos at once. Many of these changes, Mellencamps says, aren’t “huge, sexy features” but rather “a ton of detailed elements that we think just improve the experience overall.” And beneath the visible improvements, Mellencamp says the entire Vimeo codebase has been rewritten, allowing the company to make faster changes in the future."

Google into the music market

Google's Next Targets: iTunes and Amazon Music, Elza Wenzel, PCWorld (Nov 18)

Video story on Google's entry to the music scene. Has an advantage in cost, but it will be a challenge to catch up from 8 million songs. Amazon has 17 million, and iTunes 20 million tracks.

Online Video Stats

Google Dominates Online Video, In Hunt For Hulu, Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Aug 22)

Google's You Tube dominates the video scene with most viewing sessions and most time spent. But Hulu is the best at "monitization". Google, Yahoo, Amazon - others - want to acquire Hulu.

Personalized Video

Plizy offers a Pandora-like service for videos, Webware (May 24)

More for ipad owners - can find videos to watch through Plizy.

"Plizy is a new video recommendation app and service that uses a social algorithm to find videos you'll like. It mines what you and your friends do on social networks and yields, CEO Jonathan Benassaya says, near-perfect personalized playlists delivered directly to users on the Plizy iPad app. The app launched last week"

Pandia's Online Radio Search

Pandia Radio Search Resurrected, Pandia (Apr 17)

The main message is that Pandia has a new search engine and directory for finding online radio.

Pandia also has a video search section.

Better search tools at YouTube

YouTube Expands Search Filters & Related Terms, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (April 6)

New filters and search aids at YouTube. Shows example of searching for cats - of course.

Looking for music

20 Essential Online Resources for Finding New Music by Brenna Ehrlich, Mashable (Mar)

Apparently there are "scads of music discovery services out there" on the web.

Instant Video at Google Video - maybe

Google Adds Video Instant Previews To Some Results, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Mar 14)

If you see a small magnifying glass beside a video search result, mouse over it to get the video preview - then watch.

I don't see it myself.

TVO Archives Ready for Viewing

TVOntario archives go online by Kate Taylor, Globe and Mail (Feb 24)

"TVOntario opened its archives to the public yesterday, launching a website that includes more than 375 episodes from such fondly remembered shows as Saturday Night at the Movies, Studio 2 and Polka Dot Door. The educational broadcaster estimates it would take five days to watch all the material it has posted and plans to keep updating the site with more programs."

Material is streamed - you can't download. So get comfortable - lots to watch here - http://archive.tvo.org/

Yahoo Video Drops User Generated Content

Yahoo Video Dumping User Content, By Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld (Feb 22)

Another piece of Yahoo falls away.

Yahoo Video stopped acccepting user created videos in December, and now tells users to download their videos from the site by March 15, 2011.

What's left? "The site will remain up, but it will only contain content from Yahoo and its partners. User-generated content will no longer be part of the site."

Maybe there is no competing with YouTube.

Search YouTube

How to Search YouTube Like a PRO with Google Advanced Operators, Ann Smarty, MakeUseOf (Jan 31)

Shows how to use Google's advanced search operators to improves search results at YouTube. These are quotation marks, + to force a word, and intitle.

Better searching at YouTube using Topics

YouTube to Launch New Discovery Tool Tonight; Here Comes Extreme Ironing, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web (Nov 10)

YouTube is going to help people find videos through topics. You'll find it on the Test Tube site. On a search for 'records management' it is definitely better than the standard YouTube search.

But Topics does not mean human categorization. "With Topics, YouTube will try to deliver results by honing in on comments from users on videos they have viewed, sites that have linked to the video and even what users have watched in the past."

YouTube describes Topics in Give YouTube Topics on Search a whirl (Nov 10)

Stumbleupon Video Discovery

StumbleUpon Introduces Video Discovery Enhancements, by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Oct 27)

StumbleUpon supports video discovery as well. "Users can now watch, rate and share videos from multiple sites, including YouTube, Hulu, Vimeo, CollegeHumor and TED, as well as discover and watch their friends’ favorite videos and recommend videos."

See http://video.stumbleupon.com

Streaming Live from YouTube

YouTube Goes 'Live' with Streaming Experiment, Ian Paul, PC World (Sept 13)

This is a test to take place Sept 13 and 14 - and an indication of things to come.

"Google's YouTube division is testing the waters of offering a live video streaming channel that gives third parties the capability to broadcast live programming on the Web. Starting this Monday and Tuesday at 8 a.m. (PT), the online video giant introduces Live on YouTube -- a destination that will offer two days of live entertainment programming. YouTube says that its efforts are part of a "live streaming platform trial." Live on YouTube video content can be accessed via YouTube.com or via an embedded Web app that can be placed into a Website or blog."

Web Guide to Live Events

Live Matrix aims to schedule the Web, Josh Lowensohn, Web Crawler (Sept 12)

There are enough live events on the Web today to warrant a new service called Live Matrix to find them. Events will include "Apple event live blogs, online sales, or streamed concerts-" and "TV programs, auctions, and sporting events".

Finding Stock Video

5 Sources for Stock Video, Connie Crosby, Slaw (Aug 16)

Need some video to explain a point and YouTube doesn't have it? One of these might.

"But what about stock video when producing video content for presentations, websites or advertising? Here are five prominent sources for stock video I found:"

Google Music Search

With Lala Closing, Google Music Search May Use Alternatives, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Apr 30)

Google Music Search has other providers - "Indeed, you’ll see in the screenshot above that Google already offers other places with music previews, such as iLike and Rhapsody. Pandora is another service that sometimes appears. While Lala currently seems to be the default provider (Google is confirming this for me), it seems easy enough for another provider to be used."

TVBookmark for video search

Find high quality video content online, Pandia (April 18)

Recommends TVBookmark as a way for finding high quality videos. It "is a directory, an aggregator and a search engine all in one, where you can explore a variety of web TV content or search specific themes or stories".

It claims 25.485 Web TV Videos from 224 Sources .

The name implies that it searches TV videos that are on the Web. However, the About Page says "you find high quality video content from publishers, TV channels and video blogs"

Categories are good and there is a taxonomy to provide some depth: news, politics, entertainment, movies, tech and science, arts and style, sports. I think a faceted approach would be better so that format isn't mixed into subject.

I suspect that browsing will be the best way to find things. The search is very poor - doesn't recognize "" to require words to be together. A search for "stephen harper" brings back valerie harper the actress - suggesting as well that we won't find much Canadian content.

Stephen Harper does much better at videosurf - and it does offer facets to refine the search.

YouTube's redesign

YouTube's big redesign goes live to everyone, by Josh Lowensohn, Web Crawler (Mar 31)

Seems there is something for everyone in these changes: casual viewers, video makers, and would-be power users.

"What may be the most important part of the redesign though, is keeping people on the site. This goes hand in hand with helping casual users become power users. It's also to get YouTube taking up a bigger part of people's days. As YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale explained to bloggers, "People only spend 15 minutes a day on YouTube, but they spend five hours watching TV." YouTube is trying to even up the score."

YouTube Changed Everything

The YouTube (R)evolution Turns 5, Rachel Sadon, PCWorld.com (Feb 14)

"As YouTube reaches its fifth birthday, we take a look at how the site has changed life as we know it."

Bing Videos

Bing Does Videos, Researchbuzz (Nov20)

"The new Bing Video is available at http://www.bing.com/videos/browse. Here you’ll find videos from Microsoft properties, but also from other places like ABC, Hulu, and YouTube. You’ll see tabs for Editor’s Picks, hot clips, what was on TV last night, etc. You can also, as you might imagine, do a search."

Goodbye Everyzing

Everyzing (http://search.everyzing.com/) used to offer a “transcript search” of audio podcasts and video. No longer. Page states:

"Due to the market success and growing demand for EveryZing’s Universal Search and SEO Publishing solutions, we have made the decision to discontinue the consumer search portal because it no longer aligns with our strategic direction."

Searching for Music at Google and Yahoo

Hands-On: Google's Music Search Is Just So-So by Ian Paul, PCWorld (Oct 29)

Google has introduced a new Music Search which it describes at the Discover Music page - http://www.google.com/landing/music/. There's a search box there too but searches in the main Google search box should work too.

Ian Paul gave Google's new Music Search a good test. It's supposed to find sound clips but -- "In my (Ian Paul's) tests, Google easily delivered music samples when searching for album names, artists, and song titles. However, when I searched using song lyrics, Google often came up short"

But in my tests even using the ones from the Discover Music page I got nothing that seemed remarkable - Lady Gaga had some video results, as did Bon Jovi. Where are the music bits?

Search Engine Land's Matt McGee gave it a spin too - Google Music Search 2.0 Launches With Musical “OneBox”

Specifically - "Google’s music OneBox will include links to these music partner sites to discover more information about your music-based search, and sometimes the links will help you discover music that’s related to your search. Contrary to recent rumors, you won’t see any links to purchase the songs — at least for now."

That article has screenshots of what you should see. But those examples don't work either. Conclusion - not available in Canada yet.

Consolation - Yahoo does have music clips. Try this for Rod Stewart.

Public-domain multimedia to use

Online places to find public-domain multimedia by Don Reisinger, Webware (Oct 22)

Here are some ways to find multimedia content that you can use without copyright issues. These are mainly ways to access Creative Commons and public domain. Wikimedia Commons was especially recommended.

Searching for Video

We Watch More YouTube Videos than We Conduct Google Searches, Greg Jarboe, Search Engine Watch (Oct 14)

"In August 2009, Americans watched 10 billion videos on YouTube. That same month, Americans conducted 9 billion searches on Google."

So - how do people find the videos? TubeMogul did a study.

"The most common way viewers find a video (45.13% of all views our sample) is direct navigation to a video site (i.e. going to YouTube and running a search or clicking around the featured or related videos)."

About 80% of referred traffic to YouTube videos comes from blogs. Only .63% comes from video search engines. Even search engines are used more - 11.18%

Stats on Video

Google Served 10 Billion Video Views In August, Says ComScore, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Sep 28)

Video continues to draw viewers.

"According to comScore, Google/YouTube served up more than 10 billion video views in August — the first time any video site has surpassed the 10 billion mark. Other firsts during the month of August? Online users watched more than 25 billion videos overall, an all-time high. And 161 million U.S. Internet users watched video online in August, the biggest monthly total ever."

Multimedia Search Tools

Finding Videos, Audio and Images on the Web: Search Tools by Cindy Shamel, FUMSI (May 2009)

Looks at sources that can help in finding "videos, audio and images for competitive intelligence and general business applications."

Article has good real-life examples, such as this one.

"The goal was to develop insights into the business strategy of a privately held non-US company known for keeping a low profile. Neither the website nor the news or trade literature yielded anything of substance. A search of video sources through YouTube uncovered a 30-minute interview with the CEO conducted at a large financial investment conference."

Mentions:

+ Samepoint -- "images, video, and podcasts across tens of thousands of social media sites. "

+ Tubesurf - for video - "searches YouTube, MySpace Videos, Google Video, and Yahoo! Video." Much to my amazement this tool found videos on information governance

+ Searchvideo.org - videos galore and can refine to heart's delight. Has channels that includes Reuters and Forbes. Try information governance.

+ blinkx - known for having 35 million hours of video. Enormous number of sources and good for browsing - I always find it difficult to search well.

+ Yidio - has TV, songs, movies, but also news. It really is geared to entertainment and you must login to this community (can do with Facebook). I did find a TV Show on the Canadian Arctic (Pond Inlet to be specific), and news items on Prime Minister Harper's current tour.

+ Videosurf - video meta-searcher - after first search you can narrow by category, sources, type, shows. Fantastic results for canadian arctic.

More in the article about audio search, image search, and places to look for even more.

One to watch if you are really interested in online video business is ReelSeo - "online video marketing guide".

YouTube Search Features

YouTube Search Gets The Wonder Wheel by Erick Schonfeld, TechCrunch on June 19, 2009

Google added some search aids for YouTube. Must run the search first to link for Advanced Options - filter by duration, category, language, type, or feature selection.

Look for "wonder wheel" on the right under the Advanced Options link. Should see it on this search for great blue heron.

SearchMe offline

SearchMe May Go Offline Tomorrow (Updated: Offline Now) by Michael Arrington, TechCrunch (July 24)

The marvellous visual search engine, SearchMe, is offline - and trying to raise financing. In this letter to TechCrunch the company said that it will be working with the TV market where there is demand to search video on the Internet.

"We are putting together some deals with chip vendors and set top box manufacturers to port the software over to their platforms and we are going to concentrate on that market going forward."

But that could mean a loss for people who used SearchMe for the relevant and enriched web searching.

Music Search

Search engines for the music lover by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (July 9)

+ MP3realm - finds MP3 tracks which you then download.

+ Project Playlist - finds tracks or playlists - then you add to your playlist. Has opera

+ SkreemR - anything MP3, even speeches. Has Canadian hosting.

+ Songza - songs or bands but the search is excellent - has some sections from Dr Atomic by Peter Sellars. Has a "listen to similar".

Five Video Search Engines

Find your favorite clips with these video search engines, by Don Reisinger, Webware (july 7)

You can find videos through Google Video, Yahoo Video, and Bing Video, but these five have special features.

+ Blinkx - very big (35 million) and well designed

+ CastTV- television shows - "CastTV relies heavily on popular video sites like Vimeo, blip.tv, and MegaVideo. Because of that, you might find some clips on CastTV that you won't find on "professional" sites like Hulu"

+ Pixsy - does video and image search

+ Truveo - good browsing and filtering

+ Veoh - "search for online videos, television shows, movies, and music"

Truveo Video Search

AOL Video Search Site Truveo Relaunches In 17 Nations; Lands Deal With Univision, Paidcontent.org (Jun 25)

Truveo , by AOL, has had a makeover that will show in 17 countries. (Countries are listed in this press release - no Canada.)

Some facts:

+ Truveo is the second-largest video search engine worldwide after Google ( 25.6 million unique visitors)
+ second-largest in the US
+ "new video index contains more than 350 million online videos from thousands of sources around the web. "

Also - AOL’s Truveo Relaunches As Improved Video Search Destination by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land.

Calls is a "dramatically improved user experience".

Truveo creates its own index - it's not build through "feeds or deals".

Multimedia Search for Business Purposes

Finding Videos, Audio and Images on the Web: Search Tools by Cindy Shamel, Fumsi (May 2009)

There are business uses for searching multimedia for information, as this article shows.

"For this article we tested dozens of search engines and have elected to describe those that appeared most suited to business searches. As a result, many perfectly good search tools generally focused on music, television shows and movies are not included here."

Blinkx is on this list, but so are are the newer ones: TubeSurf, Searchvideo.org (powered by AOL), and Videosurf.

Icerocket is mentioned for image search as is Flickr (of course), Picsearch. and Tineye.

A few are mentioned for audio also - a diminishing choice since Yahoo dropped its audio search.

Video Search - Bing vs Google

Video Search Face-Off: Bing vs. Google, Eric Papczun, Search Engine Land (June 11)

Compares video search at Bing and Google from SEO and advertiser point of view - but searchers can benefit.

At Bing - "The source page and its associated text, as well as the timeliness of the video, seem to have the highest weight within Bing’s algorithm."

Google appears to match more on words - likely in the detailed description of the video that it has (and Bing doesn't) - it is less concerned about recency.

Display is different too - "For example, the default Bing results show videos that have very little description; they include the title, publisher, length of time and date when available. The default Google results, however, include all of these attributes as well as a detailed description of the video. On the other hand, Bing offers a feature that enables searchers to hover over the video thumbnail to preview a shortened version of the video without a click (Live Search had this for about a year, but people are rediscovering it as part of the Bing launch)."

Google Video Show Options

Google Video Adds Search Options, Google Operating System (June 7)

Google added Show Options to Google Video Search "click on "show options" and you can choose between three layouts (TV view, list view, grid view), pick a duration interval, sort the results by date or view only the high-quality videos."-

Video Search and Sharing

Vimeo now highlights hot videos with categories, by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (May 27)

Vimeo - video community

"'Vimeo rolled out a new way to discover content on its service. Dubbed categories, the new system lets users explore content that's automatically been sorted by an algorithm that scans across Vimeo's groups and channels and picks some of the best and most interesting clips."

Guide to Using YouTube

An Expert's Guide to YouTube, by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (May 7)

YouTube is no slouch in the search features department. This guide shows us that we can use Google's websearch syntax - allintitle, the - to exclude, the * as a wildcard. And if that doesn't find what you want, there are third-party tools. There are tips here for viewing and sharing.

Postscript (May 13): Video: Become a YouTube expert -- video of the tips from the guide "that could have used a little help from on-screen examples."

Search Me Stacks

SearchMe, the visual search engine, displays results in thumbnail pages, easy to read and easty to click through to the next. It's a meta-searcher in that you can move smoothly form web, to video, to images and blogs. Gather your picks into a Stack, and share that collection with others.

Postscript Dec 29, 2009 - Searchme ran out of money in mid-2009 and closed. Pity.

Video at Reddit

Reddit launches Reddit.tv for uber-popular videos, Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Apr 30)

Maybe they should call this - vyoudit

"Reddit has a new dedicated video site called Reddit.tv for clips that have become popular on its main page, as well as on its "sub-Reddit" categories. It consists of a simple video player that streams in clips, along with a playlist that lets you jump around."

MeFeedia Search

Multimedia Search Engine MeFeedia Brings Order to the Video Web, PRNewswire via Forbes (Apr 14)

MeFeedia, a multimedia search engine, has made some changes.

"In response to user feedback, the majority of MeFeedia's improvements deal with layout, site performance, and easy navigation to its major sections of content: Video, TV Shows, Music, News, and Movies. Thumbnails and video windows are now larger and higher on the page for a better viewing experience, and contextual sidebars have been added for easier navigation. The new site also loads three times as fast, due in part to its new tableless design and highly efficient multimedia search engine."

About MeFeedia

"MeFeedia aggregates media from over 25,000 sources across the Web, including major video sharing sites, TV sites, music videos, movies, and news sites. The company holds official partnerships with the likes of ABC, The WB, Hulu, Revision3, Blip.tv, ClipSyndicate and more to offer popular content. "

YouTube to get a Makeover

Google To Create “Hulu” For Music Video, Moves Toward Inclusion Of More Professional Content On YouTube, by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Apr 10)

YouTube will soon be showing a new Hulu-like design that will have more professional content and, with that, brand advertising.

The new design will offer four tabs: Movies, Music, Shows, and Videos. The first three tabs will display premium shows, clips, and movies from Google’s network and studio partners, all of which will be monetized with in-stream advertising. Meanwhile the Videos channel will house amateur and semi-pro content of the sort major brand advertisers have shied away from.

Search Trends

Google Next Victim Of Creative Destruction? (GOOG) by John Northwick, Business Week (Feb 8)

John Northwick, who watched the AOL fall from innovator grace, offered this observation: " I now see search as fragmenting and Twitter search doing to Google what broadband did to AOL."

(Mind, as commenters to the article did point out, John is CEO of betaworks, a Twitter shareholder.)

Search has moved into two main streams: video (YouTube and more) and real-time (Twitter watching).

Video:

* "YouTube generates domestically close to 3BN searches per month — it’s a bigger search destination than Yahoo. "

* "44% of YouTube views happen in the embedded YouTube player (ie off YouTube.com) and late last year they added search into the embedded experience. YouTube is clearly a very different search experience to Google.com. "

* "Video search now represents 26% of Google’s total search volume."

Notificator (the electronic message board)

This really means getting the buzz of the moment whether it's about friends or events and developments.

"Yet at http://search.twitter.com the conversations are right there in front of you. The same holds for any topical issues — lipstick on pig? — for real time questions, real time branding analysis, tracking a new product launch — on pretty much any subject if you want to know whats happening now, search.twitter.com will come up with a superior result set."

It's the social context that is important - people you know (or know of), people you trust.

The post refers to an article by Gerry Campbell on the role of social inference in search. Search is broken – really broken. (Feb 6)

"Our daily lives are rich with social inference, and they happen in real time. Search from Google, Yahoo… you name it – they are all based on published (e.g. considered, thought-through) documents that take minutes-to-weeks to update in the search index."

Campbell wants to see "Realtime search, using social inference for discovery, ranking and prioritization."

Yahoo Video

Yahoo! Changes Its Video Strategy (Again) by Bob Heyman, Search Engine Land (Mar 19)

Changes at Yahoo Video:

"Carol Bartz is taking over from co-founder Jerry Yang, and among her first initiatives is a redo of Yahoo!’s approach to video. Under Semel, Yahoo produced TV-like original series, but with little success. The new plan calls for shorter and more targeted video series. Among the new shows are “Spotlight to Nightlight,” which will feature famous mothers sharing humorous anecdotes about motherhood and fame. "

Searching Flash

Are The Search Engines Really Indexing Flash? by Jill Whelan, Search Engine Land (Mar 26)

Jill Whelan did some tests and found that "most Flash is still highly invisible in Google" - at least in straight keyword searches - you will get better matches searching filetype:swf. However, why use Flash at all, she asks, at least for business purposes.

"If, on the other hand, your company wants people to actually understand what you do when they come to your website, how does playing with the spinning balls further this goal? I don’t personally find it endearing to have to guess what’s behind each ball or cube when I mouse over it and it makes a funny sound or explodes and perhaps shows a single word or cute saying. If I’m looking to kill time, I might visit your site. But if I’m wondering if you’re a good fit for my needs at the moment, I don’t want to do a puzzle to figure this out. Instead, I am likely to seek out your competitor that provides me with information, rather than games."

Exactly.

Watch Blinkx TV

Blinkx adds web TV to video search, Guardian (Feb 5)

Blinkx, according to its CEO Suranga Chandratillake, was always about TV and then became video search. Now it has a new product for viewing web TV where you click the button and your playlist comes through.

"There's somewhere between 10 and 25% of our audience that basically turns up at our site and is looking for something interesting to watch," he said. "It's really that person we've aimed this at - and if you look at what this person clicks on, they'll typically either click on something goofy or they'll click on news content."

Also - Blinkx adds couch potato mode to video site by Stephen Shankland, Webware

Of interest: "Online video is booming. December was a record month, with U.S. viewers watching 14.3 billion online videos, 41 percent of them at Google, which operates YouTube. Blinkx's business is to try to connect people to these videos using search technology that looks not just at metadata such as video titles, but also words that are spoken and detected with speech recognition technology. "

Exalead at Work

Exalead meets Steve Arnold 12-11-2008

In this video, "Search engine expert Stephen E Arnold discusses the state of the search market, assesses Exalead's technology, and explains why he considers Exalead a company to watch."

One reason is the new search-inside a video called Voxalead that Exalead is demoing at its Lab.

There is some additional information in the blog entry - 5 questions to Stephen E. Arnold (Nov 19)

Veoh Video Search

Veoh Video Compass: A Handy Automatic Video Search Plugin by Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch (Jan 22)

Always get videos matching your query terms from Veoh with these plugins.

"Popular video site Veoh has just released a new version of its browser plugin, Veoh Video Compass. The plugin, which is available for Firefox 3 and IE7, presents a selection of videos relevant to your search queries and the pages you browse in an unobtrusive ribbon at the top of your browser. It’s a nifty feature that seems to work pretty well, effectively adding a video search to compliment whatever you’re looking at on the web."

Veoh Search Plug-in

Veoh releases search plug-in, by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Jan 9)

We are moving to a video view of information where people look for answers in the clips rather than the text. Veoh, a video aggregator, aims to help people find more with a new plug-in that that inserts video results into a strip at the top of search pages from Google, Yahoo, YouTube, MSN Live, and Ask.com.

Available at http://labs.veoh.com/labs/

Imprezzo Image Search Technology

Imprezzeo Offers a New Way to Search for Images by Michael LoPresti, Newsbreaks (Dec 15)

Imprezzeo - Another company with technology to find images according to what they look like. There are demos at the website, but we will have to wait for another search company to buy it to enhance their own image search.

"Imprezzeo’s solution is a software tool that uses proprietary content-based image retrieval (CBIR) and facial-recognition technologies to generate results sets for images."

Movies online

Free Full Length Movies - The Top Ten Sites for Free Full Length Movies - by Wendy Boswell, About .com (Dec)

If you're looking for some free movie watching and have the bandwidth, check out these 10.

Google Video Dominates

YouTube Continues To Dominate Growing Video Landscape by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 9)

Google Video, including You Tube, pulled in two thirds of the online video watching audience in October 2008 according to Comscore's Video Metrix.

Bookmark and play mp3 through Delicious

Delicious Has A Brand New Audio Player For MP3 Bookmarks by Robin Wauters, TechCrunch (Dec 6)

Delicious, the social bookmarking tools, has added "a brand new audio player to play your MP3 bookmarks inside the browser."

Online Video getting Longer

Full-length movies going online by Michael Geist, Toronto Star (Dec 8)

There is a shift taking place to longer-form video. Comcast figures on video watching in July 2008 showed an average of viewing time of 2.9 minutes - but that is sure to change.

Michel Geist mentions several films that are available for download or streamed viewing.

Geist himself released "Why Copyright? Canadian Voices on Copyright Law", a 47-minute documentary on copyright reform." ... "Finding ways to distribute films may have once posed a significant barrier, but that is clearly no longer the case. Why Copyright? was posted to online video sites such as YouTube and Blip.tv, which offer free streaming distribution. Another version was posted to Dot-Sub, a video-streaming site that enables viewers to create subtitles in other languages. Further versions were made available via BitTorrent, allowing people to download the entire DVD of the film."

Other examples are Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising (Blip.tv) and the Finnish parody, Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, at Google Video.

Conclusion: "These experiments point to the potential for taking films from the big screen to the computer screen. Combining free Internet streaming or downloading with a commercial model that may include DVD sales, merchandise sales, broadcast license fees and advertising revenues hold the promise of generating wider audiences and providing a financial payback for creators."

Google - Speech-to-text technology

Google Demoes Video Search with Speech Recognition, Google Operating System (July 14, 2008)

Google is indexing speech in some videos concerning politics and politicians at YouTube. You can try this out for yourself at this Elections 2008 site.. It has clips of speeches from Canadian politicians such as Jack Layton on the crisis in Ottawa over the Harper government (December 2008).

Select a video, enter a search term (such as economy), note the yellow markers on the play line - click on one to see your search term in the context of what the Layton said.

HD at YouTube

YouTube quietly launches official support for HD by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Dec 5)

YouTube lets you watch videos in HD. Article has an image that shows what a clip looks like in normal quality compared to HD.

Video Search 2008

2008 Video Search Year In Review by Eric Papczun, Search Engine Land (Dec 4)

"2008 has had a number of notable milestones in the arena of video search. Here are six landmark events that that have particularly stood out, demonstrating that video search has finally “arrived” as a crucial area for search marketers:"

Google has speech-to-text translation -- "Using speech recognition technology, Google indexed all the words spoken within YouTube political channel videos. Users can now find videos that contain specific keywords, such as “Joe Six Pack,” and navigate directly to the part of the video where the keyword was used."

Wikimedia into Video

Wikipedia gears up for flood of video and photo files by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Nov 19)

Plans afoot at Wikimedia (Wikipedia, WIkinews, Wikibooks) to have video.

"With the more aggressive support for media files will come, eventually, new ways to edit those media. Kaltura has been working with Wikimedia to create an online video editor that supports wikipedia concepts: users will be able to edit others' videos, and everyone will be able to see the edit history."

How is this different than YouTube? Do we need another service for user-made videos?

Generation YouTube

Is YouTube the Next Google? by Alex Iskokl, Read Write Web (Nov 18)

Could we get all the information we need through watching YouTube videos? Some do.

This search experiment shows strong potential. Alex Iskokl concluded, "I walked away with the impression that we are not quite there yet, but was intrigued. Clearly a lot of things lend themselves to video, not just movies and music clips, but educational videos, tourism and a lot of other things. If video content continues to grow, could video eventually replace text?"

Videocrawler

AT&T debuts video search site by Caroline McCarthy, Webware (Nov 10)

From AOL - VideoCrawler, which can search more than 1,600 online video outlets. Won't host new videos - just search others.

Flickr for Creative Commons photos

3 great ways to find free images, Pandia (Nov 5)

Pandia recommends 3 tools for searching Flickr for free images to use under the Creative Commons License. Over 80 million photos at Flickr are tagged as Creative Commons. The tools are Flickr itself - Advanced, CompFight, and FlickrStorm. Get details from posting.

MeFeedia Relaunched

Video Search Engine Mefeedia Relaunches. Read Write Web (Nov 6)

"Today, Mefeedia relaunched with an updated user interface and the ability to search for free, full-length streaming movies."

Flickr Milestone

Flickr reaches 3 billion photographs By Stephen Shankland, CNet (Nov 4)

Flickr has 3 billion images - that's a big number. It gained a billion in less than a year. Another surprise - Facebook has 10 billion photos. Flickr is for photo shutter bugs, Facebook for friends and family - or something like that.

Virtual Earth Images

Microsoft Adds Virtual Earth Images To Live Search by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 27)

People in the US will find Virtual Earth “Birds Eye” panoramas of selected places in Live Search image search results. (Why only the US?)

7 New Search Tools

7 Search Tools You May Not Know … But Should by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Oct 21)

These are 7 new search tools each with a different twist. Some do web - offering selection of several tools, some do images, one does recommendations and one finds tickets. The twists are mainly in interface and display.

+ Fasteagle - multi-tool, all-in-one kind of search - except choices are limited.

+ Kedrix - meta search - Google, Yahoo, Live, Ask - individual tabs. This approach has been used before (many times - Zuula is one). Some love this kind of engine, but it's tough for these guys to stay in business.

+ Soovle - wonder if they meant swivil, or maybe it's so-o-vle? Either way - Soovle expands search terms as you type to show suggestions from 6 centres (Google, Ask, Yahoo, Wikipedia, YouTube, Answers) - and you then choose which suggestion you want to try and where. Interesting idea, not very helpful in practice. Screen is difficult to read (Firefox 3.0), and suggestions are always going to be very elementary, common phrase expansions.

+ Facesaerch - great film-strip type of display of faces matching your search term.

+ CompFight - has features for searching Flickr, whether on text or tag, Creative Commons or original, safe search. Search for Utah rocks - some fantastic photos.

+ Tastekid - recommendation engine - these are always time sinks where you can spend hours telling the engine about your likes and dislikes and sometimes get a good recommendation, but most of the time not.

+ Fansnap - finds tickets - works with ticket providers in the United States

VideoSurf Ready

VideoSurf Is Now Live by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (Oct 15)

Chris Sherman wrote - "“ VideoSurf is one of the most innovative, radically different approaches to video search (or any kind of search for that matter) that I’ve ever seen. Even better: It delivers highly relevant search results—something most video search services fall sadly short on for many types of searches.”"

Works for finding Tina Fay as Sarah Palin.

http://www.videosurf.com/video/snl-tina-fay-as-sarah-palin-50902162

Image Search

How to Search Images Online - Most Advanced Methods by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Oct 8)

Pointers on advanced image search methods: face, colour, and similiarity.

Compress Images

Yahoo tool helps Web programmers shrink images by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Oct 2)

"The Web-based tool, called Smush It , can perform multiple operations to shrink graphics file sizes without impairing visual appeal, ... "

Truveo Compares Itself to Other Video Search

Truveo Says It’s The Most Comprehensive Video Search Provider by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Sept 23)

"An internal Truveo study conducted during the past month found that Truveo has a more comprehensive video search coverage than its top competitors. According to Truveo it undertook the study itself because “there is no major testing organization, publication or consulting firm publicly conducting ongoing quality studies of video search engines.”"

Exalead's Image Search

Exalead improves image search with intuitive user interface Lars Våge, Internetbrus, Pandia (Sept

Strong words of praise about Exalead's image search - too bad the collection is so small. "Exalead has recently updated its image search engine with several major improvements."

VideoSurf - Radically Different

VideoSurf: New, Genuinely Radical Video Search, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (sep 9)

Danny Sullivan says that VideoSurf is "innovative" and "radically different:.

"VideoSurf is a computer vision search engine that processes all of the kinds of information most video search services do, but then goes a step further, applying a proprietary process using "multigrid fast computation" and some heavy-duty computer processing power to analyze videos, identify people, and extract all kinds of additional information directly from the video itself. Until I saw the demo, I thought this type of technology was still years away."

Visual Search

Visual search engine set for launch?, Resourceshelf (Aug )

The TinEye search engine will search for images on the Net that match the one you show it - great for tracking down unauthorized use of your photographs or designs. TimEye is from Idee, a Toronto company.

Podcasts slow to be accepted

Podcast Downloading 2008, PEW Internet (Aug 30)

Slow growth with podcast use.

"As gadgets with digital audio capability proliferate, podcast downloading continues to increase. Currently, 19% of all internet users say they have downloaded a podcast so they could listen to it or view it later. This most recent percentage is up from 12% of internet users who reported downloading podcasts in our August 2006 survey and 7% in our February-April 2006 survey. Still, podcasting has yet to become a fixture in the everyday lives of internet users, as very few internet users download podcasts on a typical day."

Olympics Online

Getting your Olympics fix online by Jack Kapica, Globe Technology (Aug 8)

There is more than one way to get streamed video feeds for the Olympic games. This article lists the best places, but in the recommends high-definition TV.

Online Canadians might chose CBC Sports - "Canadians will be served just as well (or even better) by CBC.ca, which is streaming their TV coverage of the Olympics live. The CBC is planning to broadcast nine streams of coverage, for a total of 1,500 hours of coverage, more than the TV network plans to broadcast."

Streaming the Olympics

Will the Olympics melt the Internet? by Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, ZDNet (Aug 7)

NBC is streaming the Olympics for live viewing. Will the Internet hold up?

"[Brick] Eksten’s company [Digital Rapids], based in Markham, Ontario, is providing encoding, streaming and management systems to provide live streaming of the 2008 Olympic Games to Internet audiences in China, working for CCTV. Closer to home, Digital Rapids is providing encoding, transcoding and streaming systems to NBC Universal, for the live streaming of the Games that have already begun at www.nbcolympics.com."

Postscript: If you'd like to participate, PC World has the how-to.

Manage Your Summer Olympics Viewing Experience -- Use NBC's stream of thousands of hours of high-quality vide--and many extras--for a totally enjoyable Olympics experience on your PC. -- by Melissa Perenson.

But you'll need wide broadband and powerful computer.

"Want to enjoy the Olympics online? You'll need a broadband pipe that's big enough to meet the demands of NBC's Silverlight video player. According to Schematic, which designed the player for NBC, the Popup mode (a small pop-up screen that coexists with your spreadsheets and Word docs) will require a 512-kbps broadband connection plus either a PC with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 CPU and 512MB of RAM or an Intel-based Mac PC."

Also - comments posted for this article indicate only Windows Vista.

Enhancements to Truveo

Truveo Improves Video Search with Release of New Site, AOL Press Release (June 12)

Truveo, AOL's video search engine, has enhanced its service.

+ Faster viewing of videos
+ "Improved display of related videos"
+ "Expanded and easier video sharing:"
+ "Simplified ratings: Users can now rank videos through a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down rating system"
+ "Cleaner look and feel"

Truveo has 17 portals and there is not one for Canada.

AOL Radio

AOL launches updated radio service, adds CBS stations By Linda Rosencrance, Computer World (June 10)

AOL added CBS stations to AOL Radio and redesigned the online player.

Polymeta - another metasearch

AllPlus has a second great metasearch engine - a sibling named Polymeta.com . Endre Jofoldi of AllPlus describes Polymeta as having a different interface - "where you can specify the target sources and you can see the individual result pages of those sources as well."

Indeed you can - click on Show Sources on the front page and select from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Exalead, Alltheweb, and Gigablast for the web search. There are other sets for News, Images, Blogs, Video.

Same topic clusters come up as are at AllPlus, and there is a panel for images and possibly other resources on the right.

Some searches will show "also consider" with check boxes for adding terms.

I'm guessing this is a Hungarian firm from the information page.

List of features goes well beyond what is normally shown for a search engine, let alone a metasearch engine: multi-field parsing, spell checker, conceptual and contextual analysis, clustering.

It is likely that this is the show piece for a company that is aiming to sell search solutions to companies. I wonder if Vivisimo is worried.

MeFeedia News Video for the US

Mefeedia introduces news video search by Harrison Hoffman, Webware (May 28)

Mefeedia, just launched in March for finding videos, has added news videos and claims to have more than 500 news sources.

Stories on Mefeedia News are by broad category, world, or US. Channels will show networks (eg ABC, CBS, BBC, Comedy) - much like the television. No CBC or other Canadian content that I can see.

Discovery vs Search

Stumbling Upon Discovery And Search by David Berkowitz, Search Insider
(April 29th, 2008)

Lots in this on search vs discovery as practiced in web search and video search. It looks at the popularity of stumbles (Stumbleupon), and the study by Clipblast that showed the video viewers much prefer discovery and recommendations over searching for finding new videos.

"Last week, right after I released a column on “The Fine Line Between Search and Discovery,” three reports came out from Radar Networks, StumbleUpon, and ClipBlast that offer more clues on how search and discovery are converging and diverging."

Alternatives for Image Search

Enhanced Image Search - What Is It Like? by Ann Smarty (May 19)

This article lists 7 image search engines with features that go beyond Google, Yahoo and Flickr. It includes a neat summary table of qualities.

"The image search giants (Google images, Yahoo images and even Flickr) represent rather a poor example of image search usability (to my mind). Luckily we have a number of good examples (still none of them is perfect):"

SEM for Images

Effectively Using Images by Vanessa Fox, jane and robot (May 14)

Vanessa Fox gives advice on how to optimize a site for images and improve placement in web results. Tips will be useful to searchers too in searching on filename, alt tag, surrounding tags. Searchers will also be happy to see the end of images being used as headings.

Video site for young children

Online Video for the Very Young by Josh Catone, Read Write Web (May 13)

Video site for kids - hopefully safe.

" Totlol is a new video site that launched in beta this week aimed at children aged 6 months to 6 years. The site is community moderated to ensure that video content is always appropriate for small children."

Demand for Video

Video and the Future of the Internet by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUp Digital (May 1)

There are many issues surrounding video on the Internet - load on broadband networks being a major one. But putting that aside for the moment, if you aren't a video viewer now, you will be soon.

"In the meantime, if you’re not currently a consumer of internet video content, there are easy ways to see what the fuss is all about. Dozens of video-hosting services exist, where anyone can upload a video and view it. Most are free sites supported by advertising while a few provide both free and pay options."

Genre at Google Video

Google Video Categories Google Operating System (Apr 28)

At Google Video use the prefix genre: to indicate what you want - animation, comedy, documentary, educational - several more.

Google Image Search

Google To Fine-Tune Image Searches Eric Zeman, Information Week (Apr 29, 2008 )

Google will be adopting new indexing of images to make it easier to find a specific image. Called VisualRank, the new algorithm is based on a scoring system on relevance developed by Google employees. This is mainly for "visual product search".

"With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image "relevance." The researchers said the retrieval returned 83% less irrelevant images."

Google asserts that its Google Image Search is the "most comprehensive image search on the Web."

More information in A Google Prototype for a Precision Image Search, New York Times (Apr 28)

Online Video Viewing

Procrastinate much? Americans watched more than 10 billion online videos in February By Caroline McCarthy, CNet via Webware (Apr 16)

Figures from Comscore for Feb 2008 indicate that "U.S. Web users watched more than 10 billion online videos during the month of February. That's a 66 percent gain from the previous year." ... "The average video length, according to the statistics, was 2.7 minutes. And the average viewer watched 75 videos in the month of February, which seems to point to a lot of short clips."

Flickr 90 sec videos

Flickr.com expands into video by MATT HARTLEY, Globe and Mail (Apr 8)

Flickr users can upload short videos in addition to photos.

"But don't expect Flickr's new video offerings to amount to anything resembling a YouTube-killer. Videos on Flickr will be limited to 90 seconds, a length specifically designed for amateur photographers to post short clips captured on their digital cameras."

Some figures:

+ Flickr has 2 billion photos, 43 million visitors / month
+ US video watchers watched 3.4 billion videos through either Google Video or Google's YouTube in January 2008 - 33% of the total. Yahoo users watched 315 million videos through Yahoo video.

Blinkx adds navigation DVD style to TV

Blinkx BBTV brings Web interactivity to TV, film By Elinor Mills WebWare (Apr 1)

Blinkx is introducing Blinkx BBTV (Broadband TV) - watch movies of TV shows while being able to "jump directly to a particular place in the video based on the transcript and click on a word in the transcript to pull up more information."

"The service, which requires a small software download, is free of charge and free of ads, for now. Ads will come later, says Suranga Chandratillake, chief executive of Blinkx."

CBC's BitTorrent experiment

CBC prime time ready for BitTorrent by Michael Geist, The Star (Mar 24)

CBC is releasing a high-resolution version of the finale of Canada's Next Great Prime Minister without copy protection on BitTorrent. "The public will be able to download, copy and share the program without restrictions."

How easily we can see this depends on Canada's Internet service providers.

"Companies such as Rogers have admitted that they actively limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file swapping on BitTorrent. Those practices – known as traffic shaping – may leave Canadians wondering why they are unable to swiftly download CBC content. In fact, critics point to the anti-competitive effects of ISPs limiting access to new forms of video distribution, while actively offering consumers competing video services."

MeFeedia for Video Search

Announcing Video Search - Search across 15,000 Video Sites, MeFeedia blog (

MeFeedia is a new video search site which claims to index "the best video available from many, many sources". It has video, podcasts, music, and TV. Has some search aids such as related searches, and "narrow by show".

Everyzing Video Search

Can EveryZing Automate Video SEO? by Bob Heyman, Search Engine Land (Mar 20)

"EveryZing (formerly named Podzinger) is a Boston based company that has announced a suite of products for video search, EveryZing's ezSearch product lets media companies offer their users a single integrated search box for audio, video, images, and text. Once ezSearch has blended results into a unified database, the company's ezSEO service can then make all that content easier to find."

Flickr Video

Flickr Video: Does it stand a chance? By Josh Lowensohn, CNET (Mar 19)

Flickr does a lot that is right - lists features FLickr has for photos that could be useful for video - and what else it will need to do.

Idée Visual Search

Search engines: Image conscious by Andrew Wahl, From the March 17, 2008 issue of Canadian Business magazine.

Idée Inc. is a Toronto-based company that has been working on search technology for images that matches on patterns, texture, shapes, and colours for several years. As described in this article, "Idée’s visual search is conducted using another image, comparing its unique “fingerprint” of visual data to a database of other images’ fingerprints."

The company has been quietly acquiring customers

"Since founding Idée in 1999, CEO Boujnane has flown the 22-person firm under the radar, quietly licensing software to Adobe Systems Inc. for use in its Photoshop Elements product, and building a small stable of A-list clients like the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and stock photo companies Getty Images Inc. and Masterfile Corp., which use Idée to track the use of their images in print and online. In December, online content-sharing site Digg.com began using Idée’s software to screen for duplicate image submissions."

The next step is to have a search engine people can use to find images similar to the one in hand.

"TinEye, the search engine’s working name, is now available in invitation-only beta and makes its first public demonstrations the week of March 3 at the high-profile ETech emerging-technology conference in San Diego. Boujnane and Bloore expect TinEye — or whatever it is renamed — to be ready for a full public web launch by fall. “The goal here is to be working with billions of [visual] assets, images as well as video,” says Boujnane. “It’s something the world has been talking about for quite some time as the next generation of search.”"

blinkx and Encyclopedia Britannica

blinkx Partners with Encyclopaedia Britannica to Bring Users Fascinating Videos , Blinkx (Feb 20)

"blinkx, the world’s largest video search engine, today announced a partnership with Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. (www.britannica.com), a worldwide leader in reference, education and learning. Britannica’s online video content is now more easily accessible than ever before at blinkx.com. Under the terms of the agreement, blinkx will leverage its AdHoc platform to place contextually relevant advertising against the footage, and will share resulting advertising revenue with Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc."

Video Viewing Tools

4 YouTube Tools you Probably Don’t Know About Best Article Every Day blog (Feb 14)

Don't have to limit yourself to YouTube. There are other places for viewing and downloading videos.

+ iDesktop.tv - find videos
+ OrbitDownloader - all-in-one media downloader
+ Videoembed - "It automatically adds embedded video after each link to pages like Metacafe, Youtube, Myspace… and many others so you can view the video without going to the website."
+ VideoFocus - strip out ads, comments and other distractions.

Yahoo Offloads Music Unlimited

Yahoo selling music service to Rhapsody America Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY (Feb 4)

"Yahoo Music will continue to offer music videos, Internet radio and music downloads. But customers of its monthly Yahoo Music Unlimited service will be migrated to Rhapsody. No firm timetable has been set. Yahoo, which expects the deal to close by the middle of year, did not disclose terms."

Amazon Could Scoop iTunes

Amazon to take MP3 downloads international Scott Snowden, Reg Hardware (Jan 28)

"Amazon MP3 will offer customers MP3s free from the constrains of digital rights management from all four major music labels - including Warner, as we reported in December, as well as over 33,000 independent labels. Every track will be compatible with almost any device, including PCs and Macs, iPods, Zunes, Creative's players and music-enabled phones."

Audio Search

Audiobaba - Yet Another Audio Search Engine Altsearchengines (Jan 25)

Thank goodness for AltSearchEngines finding new tools. " Audiobaba is a next-generation music search and recommendation engine. ... Audiobaba searches for music by fingerprinting the acoustic and impossible to articulate qualities of every song in its database and searches through them acoustically."

Begin with something that is likely to be there - such as Cole Porter - see the selections (mainly Ella Fitsgerald); play one and look for matches; play the matches and judge how close they are. Do I Love You and I Love Paris do have similarities.

Amazon for MP3 Downloads

Amazon MP3 Péter's Digital Reference Shelf (December 2007)

Customary thorough review of Amazon's MP3 music download service for the researcher and the audiophile from Péter Jacsó .

The Content: "Amazon made me jump when it announced in September its MP3, pay-as-you-go service. At that time, it had "only" 2 million songs of about 180,000 albums, but at the end of December, 2007 Amazon made a deal with the Warner Music Group, and increased the total number of songs to slightly above 3 million in nearly 262,000 albums by the last day of the year when I finished this review. Its content features 256 Kbps recording density, which is perceivable even for tin eared music fans like myself, and was quite unique in this market arena where 128 Kbs is dominant, with a few 192 Kbps recording."

Genres: "As for the genre composition of the collection, I ran a statistical search. It is to be noted that on the average 1.7 genres are assigned to each track. Pop and Rock has by far the largest share with about 15% each. Somewhat surprisingly, International (not including Latina music) and Classical represent the second largest strata with 9% each, followed closely by Alternative Rock at 8% and by Jazz and Dance/DJ albums at 6% each. Folk and Rap/Hip Hop hover around 3.6%, then come Opera/Vocal, Latin Music and Country close to 3%, followed by Blues, R&B, and Hard Rock/Metal with between 2.1-2.4%. Christian, Gospel and New Age are neck in neck with 1.6%, and the rest is Soundtracks, Broadways, Children Music and Miscellaneous."

LOC photos on Flickr

Photos: Flickr checks out Library archives CNet News UK (Jan 21)

Library of Congress has released 3,155 photos to Flickr "to invite people to add metadata to images that previously had little. The library is hoping that the metadata will add new context and meaning to the photos and make them more accessible to the public." CNet describes 10 of these photos.

Video Market Share

Online Video: 2007 Year In Review compete (Jan 16)

Extensive statistics on video market share for US users in December and November 2007.

"YouTube.com continued to lead the field of video contenders in December, commanding 52.3% market share with 238M Visits on 59M Unique Visitors, up 6.1% from November and 40% since December, 2006. The overall online video market, which consists of Compete’s classification of over 50 sites and subdomains serving video to US-based visitors, grew 7.4% for the month."

Queen Elizabeth on YouTube

Queen launches YouTube channel BBC (Dec 23)

"The Queen has launched her own channel on the video-sharing website YouTube."

On the 50th anniversary of televising the Christmas message, Queen Elizabeth will be broadcasting through YouTube as well. The new Royal Channel on YouTube will have the Christmas Day message, historical footage from weddings and other events, along with other material about the Royal Family.

"The palace said it hoped the site would make the 81-year-old monarch's annual speech "more accessible to younger people and those in other countries"."

Sites:
The Royal Channel at You Tube (http://www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel)
British Monarchy (http://www.royal.gov.uk)

You Tube Watching

YouTube top choice for web watchers Reuters via Silicon.com (Dec 20)

"Approximately 65 per cent of the 2,455 US adults surveyed by Harris Interactive said they have watched a video on YouTube, compared to 42 per cent during the same time last year."

"More than 42 per cent of YouTube viewers said they visit the site frequently, up from 33 per cent last year."

"Apart from YouTube, which most people favoured because they felt it had almost every video they could find, 43 per cent said they have watched a video on a TV-network website, followed by 35 per cent on news sites and less than 30 per cent on search engines such as Yahoo! and Google."

Truveo International

Video Search Engine Truveo Expands To More Countries Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Dec 11)

"As part of its continuing international rollout, AOL-owned video search engine Truveo has launched in Australia, Brazil, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia and Turkey. "

PicSearch for Image Search

PicSearch : Intuitive Relevant Image Search Engine Search Engine Journal (Dec 8)

"Founded by two engineering students at the beginning of this millennium, PicSearch is a multi-language, image search engine that rivals Google’s and Yahoo’s image search service, with a database of more than 1.7 billion images. The engine also indexes video and audio files."

Viewing Video Online

Downloading Videos On The Rise Among High-Speed Internet Users
by Tanya Irwin, MediaPost (Dec 6, 2007)

Watching video online is catching on, though television is still preferred for watching TV programs.

"About 61% of high-speed Internet users download online video content at least once a week and 86% do so on a monthly basis, compared to 45% and 71%, respectively, in the 2006 study. News and user-generated, non-professional content are the most often viewed genres, followed by movie previews/trailers, music videos, and previews/segments of TV shows."

Many of the 27% of Internet users who have a handheld cell, ipod, pda with video capability are watching video on it.

"Among those with video-enabled handheld devices, about 35% watch video on their devices at least weekly and 62% do so at least monthly, translating to 18% of Internet users overall who watch video content on a handheld device at least monthly. This figure is up from 8% just one year ago."

There are the two extremes - people installing giant HD screens in their home entertainment centres , and people watching videos on screens the size of the palm of their hands.

Video Ready Browsers

Mozilla, Opera Want to Make Video on the Web Easier - New features in the Firefox and Opera browsers could make it less complex and cheaper for people to incorporate video into their Web sites.
Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service (Dec 7)

"Firefox and Opera will support a new HTML tag specifically for embedding video in Web pages. As long as the browsers support a video's specific codec, or encoding method, the browsers will then be able to play the video without launching third-party enabling software .."

Theseus

The Theseus image and video search project Pandia (Nov 28)

"Theseus is definitely not about developing a European Google. This is a technology-push initiative in which research institutions and companies cooperate to develop search technologies that can be used in various search engines and tools. The main focus is on image and video search."

Pandia has been following the story of Quaero and then Theseus for some time.

Video Search Notes

Meet the Video Search Engines Search Engine Roundtable (Aug 23, 2007)

Has notes about several of the video search engines - probably obtained from a conference session: Yahoo, Blinkx, Everyzing, Truveo.

Flickr's Global Map of Photos

Flickr to map the world's latest photo hot spots Reuters via CNet News (Nov 19)

"Flickr on Monday will unveil a way for Web users to browse photos from tens of millions of geographically located photos loaded up to its site.

The service, called "Places," identifies on a global map the latest hot spots for photo contributions."

Google Image Search

Google Image Search Offers Suggestions Googlified (Nov 10)

Yahoo has had this for some time. Now Google suggests "also try" on image searches.

YouTube Canada

Do we really need a YouTube Canada? Matthew Ingram, Globe and Mail (May 6)

There is a YouTube Canada - small Canadian flag in top right corner. Is this helpful? Wouldn't Canadian video makers prefer to be in the popularity rankings at YouTube.com? Do Canadian viewers want to be limited? Funny that YouTube itself won't be geographically restrained.

Fortunately, YouTube won't redirect people according to their IP number.

Of interest:

"YouTube also had several new Canadian partners at the news conference, including the CBC, Dose.ca, the CommandN video blog and a site called NewsCanada. Partners are featured in a special location on the YouTube home page, and the company says it plans to share advertising revenue with its partners at some point in the future."

"One spokeswoman for YouTube said clips from the Canadian version of the site might make their way to the home page at YouTube.com as well, in the same way that videos from anywhere do -- that is, by being watched a lot or voted up by users. She said there was no specific program of featuring specific geographical content at YouTube.com."

Blinkx Video Search

blinkx Advances Lead in Video Search, Surpasses New Milestone With Over 18 Million Hours of Content and More Than 220 Media Partnerships PrNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 29)

"blinkx, the world's largest video search engine, today reached a new milestone: with more than 220 media partnerships and indexing over 18,000,000 hours of video, audio, viral and TV content, blinkx is the top destination for searching video on the Web."

Hulu: Video from NBC and Fox

Hulu adds Sony, MGM, launches test, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Oct 29)

Hulu - new online video service, joint venture of General Electric's NBC Universal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, will pick up shows from Sony Pictures Television and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

To be launched early 2008 and will only be available to the US audience. Will offer free viewing of movies and television shows.

"NBC Universal has stopped offering its shows for sales on iTunes and pulled its channel off of YouTube."

Fox, NBC set YouTube rival - New online video site, Hulu.com, to premiere in a few months with free views of full-length TV episodes and films, CNN Money (Oct 29)

ClipBlast Video Widget

Clipblast! Introduces Video Widget, Econtent (Sept 28)

ClipBlast is a customizable video finding tool with some big US media providers such as CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX. There is a public beta widget you can download and put on your desktop.

"ClipBlast! Video Widget is an internet video search and navigation tool that resides on the desktop, enabling search, navigation, browsing, and viewing of the Video Web without having to launch a browser or visit a specific website. ClipBlast! is working with video-content providers--including MySpace, Showtime, Fox, CBS and independent producers--to create customized, branded versions of the Video Widget for specific target audiences."

Current.com - news and videos

Al Gore reinvents the Internet (ad model), Paul R La Monica, CNN Money.com (Oct 15)

Current is a cable network owned by Al Gore (available in the US on premium cable). Current.com, the companion website, has been relaunched as a more social version.

"The new Web site lets people submit news articles and videos, similar to what the cable channel, which mainly features short videos from users, does.... The new version of the site also does a better job of integrating clips from the TV network with the community aspects of the Web than its predecessor."

The new twist is that users can generate their own ads. For now, just take a look at the stories and videos.

Video Alerts, Video Reviews

Two entries about videos at ResearchBuzz. Seems that everyone is either watching videos or creating them and possibly both.

Information Trapping: Google Has Video Alerts (Sept 30) - you have to fiddle somewhat with the syntax to get an alert you can use.

Amazon’s New Video Reviews, Jeff Bezos Likes Milk -- "Amazon is now inviting customers to post video reviews of products". Calishain gives the syntax for finding these through Google - inurl:videopreplay site:amazon.com

Berkeley lectures on YouTube

Berkeley university puts courses on YouTube, Sydney Morning Herald (Oct 4)

"Berkeley university, one of the most prestigious universities in the US, is embracing the Internet revolution by putting free videos of courses on YouTube.

More than 300 hours of University of California, Berkeley, classes and events are available online at the web address www.youtube.com/ucberkeley, college officials announced on Wednesday."

Swicki video

Eurekster Adds Video to Social Search Swicki With blinkx Partnership, Marketwire via Market Watch (Oct 2)

"Eurekster today announces the availability of custom social video search and a video buzzcloud widget featuring best-of-breed video content from blinkx. Eurekster is a pioneer and leader in providing a custom search experience and a content discovery engine that provides relevant, targeted, community-driven results - to increase search relevance and value for site visitors, Web publishers and "infopreneurs." With Eurekster, users can build and customize a swicki search portal on any topic, and share and distribute the widget to grow a community of interested users. With every search, the swicki becomes more relevant and meaningful to the user community, and more valuable to the swicki builder."

Finding Music

Searching For Music and Personalizing Those Results, ResourceShelf (Sept 28, 2007)

We can look forward to better ways to find music online. UCSD is working on a method to find songs just by describing what you want. Today, music lovers can use Pandora to find more of what they know they like.

Top Video Sites

Top video sites in August 2007: YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, ZDNet (Sept 26)

YouTube had 56 million users in August 2007, a growth of 66% over last year - clearly the leader. In second place, MySpace had 17 mm and Google Video 14 mm. Yahoo Video was sixth at just under 12 mm.

Videos from TED.com

Finding and Sharing Videos Online by Steve Bass, PC World

Go to Ted.com to get high-quality videos on "ideas worth spreading". Marvellous collection organized by theme and speaker. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design and is famous for its conference. You can join for email updates.

Bass also refers to articles about finding and sharing videos.

Here's how to sift through the junk and find some seriously high-quality videos, plus some help sharing them.

Everyzing for all media

Podzinger search engine becomes Everyzing, Pandia (Aug 29)

Everyzing is the old Podzinger - that's why it's so good. The reason for the name change - "because it now does in some way index “everything” — or at least all types of multimedia, audio and video included."

Public Radio Stations

PublicRadioFan.com - oh gather all ye fans of the Canadian CBC, the Australian ABC, BBC, NPR and more. "PublicRadioFan.com features schedule listings for thousands of public radio stations and programs around the world. Follow the audio links to hear your favorite programs and discover new ones."

Mentioned in <b>Milestones Coming Soon for Two ResourceShelf Favorites (PublicRadioFan and NewsNow) ResourceShelf (Aug 30)

Sproose does Video

Sproose , a search engine that ranks web results by user votes, has added voting for video to its search site. Blinkx supplies the videos and Sproose supplies the voting technology. This makes more sense to me than voting for particular web results. However, Sproose does have additional functionality as a social bookmarking tool: tagging, add comments, save bookmarks, follow up on what other people liked.

New image search

Look Smart: UCSD Works to Improve Images Searches Sue Marquette Poremba - September 2007 Issue of eContent (Aug 24)

People search for images second to text on web pages. Supervised Multiclass Labeling (SML) is a new content-based image retrieval program being developed that will have a trainable "classifier".

"A classifier is an algorithm that looks for statistical regularities in data. If we give enough images of a specific class, like, sky, the classifier will be able to identify what makes images containing sky different from other types of images.” "

Special Syntax at Live Search Images

Live Search Adds Some Image Searching Options, ResearchBuzz (July 28)

Live Search Images has new syntax for searching its collection. Calishain asks why should we use this and not some pulldown menus - indeed!

+ filter:face — Finds only results with faces in them
+ filter:portrait — "finds full-length portrait-type things"
+ filter:bw — Finds pictures only in black and white.

I tried filter:face irish - many are faces but not all. What's the dog doing there?

Barry Schwartz at Search engine land covered this too - Live Image Search Adds Face, Portrait, B/W, & Related Features. He uses Paris Hilton in his examples.

Live Image Search

Live Image Search lets you search for faces, Pandia (Jul 29)

"The Live Search weblog reports that Microsoft’s search image search engine now lets you narrow down image search results to faces, portraits and black and white images."

YouTube for Politics

YouTube to become vital part of 2008 U.S. election campaign eitb24 (July 22)

This story about the use of YouTube for political purposes in the U.S. was picked up in an English-language site from the Basque country in Spain! Political purposes aren't only promotional for the campaigners such as "I've Got a Crush...On Obama" but by individuals asking questions and raising issues.

"From rapid dissemination of political blunders, to a new wave of music videos featuring scantily clad women singing the praises of their favorites, YouTube.com has sparked a new interest in politics."

IHT has more details on the use of YouTube video for the upcoming debates between presidential candidates, Democratic (July 23) and Republicans (Sept 17) parties.
YouTube and CNN invite ordinary Americans into presidential debates , Katharine Q Seelye, International Herald Tribune (July 22)

"Many analysts, from savvy consultants to individual bloggers, see the video format as having the potential to bring new voices into the process and perhaps, ultimately, spur more people to vote."

Google Video Leads

Google Leads the Way in Online Video, Josh Catone, Read/Write Web (July 17)

Google slips a bit in market share for web search according to Comshare numbers but it leads in online video thanks to YouTube. In May 2007 it had 21.5% of the US market. Video is very popular - "75% of Americans watched video online in the past month"

Social Video Search

Searchles Video Search: Bringing You and Your Favorite Videos to a Whole New Level of Togetherness, Searchles Blog (July 17)

Social site Searchles has been turning on the video these past few months. People still post articles and comments and rate the posts - mind, I think I see a lot of spam in the Technology section - but the big deal now is video search of multiples sources (YouTube, Google etc) and to find and share as part of a group.

As the blog posting puts it - "Our social search features optimize the search experience with results that are weighted towards those trusted users in your circle of groups and friends on Searchles."

AltSearchEngines likes it - Seinfeld rocks on Searchles video search!

Exalead Image Search

Exalead : A Look Into Semantic Image Search by Arun Radhakrishnan , Search Engine Journal (Jul 9)

Close look at Exalead's new image search - goes beyond text tags to capture image qualities and patterns - that's how it can identify faces.

Video Search

Changes and Enhancements at AOL Video Search; New Federated Search Capabilities, ResourceShelf (July 3)

Updates on changes to AOL Video - also mentions Google Video, Ask.com Video, and MS Live Video.

Google Flash Player for MP3

Listen to MP3 Files Online Using Google's Flash Player, Google Operating System (July 1)

Usually you have to download the mp3 file, but Google Flash Player lets you listen online. This posting has instructions on how to use this with Firefox.

Dogpile Video Search

InfoSpace Introduces Video Search On Dogpile, Blinkx Offers Contextual Ad Targeting For Video, Search Engine Land (Jun 25)

Blinkx has teamed up with Infospace also (just announced deal with Ask.com) - this time to power the Dogpile video search.

Of interest - "According to January 2007 data from comScore, online video reaches 70 percent of the U.S. Internet audience and per-user video consumption is growing rapidly. Video is an area of tremendous interest to advertisers, and video search offers an opportunity to bring graphical and paid-search advertising together in very interesting ways."

Google Image Search

Google Images Supports Site Filter Command, SEO Roundtable (June 22)

Google Image Search supports some syntax including site:

Video in Google Universal

Some Q&A On Recent Google Video & YouTube Changes by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jun 15)

Google representative Gabriel Stricker answered some questions about the video displayed in Google's universal search - specifically - "third-party videos cannot be played as a video at all within the web results"

Everyzing

Podzinger Is Now EveryZing, Search Engine Land (June 12)

The podcast search engine Podzinger has added video and rebranded itself as EveryZing .

Blinkx for Ask.com Video Search

Blinkx, Video Search Engine, To Power Ask.com Video Search Serachengineland (Jun 5)

"This deal will give Ask.com access to Blinkx's 12 million hours of audio and video content."

Yahoo Image Search

Yahoo Image Search Integrates Flickr Images, Research Buzz (Jun 26)

This will enlarge Yahoo's Image search - over 300 million Flickr photos were added to Yahoo Images. But as Tara Calishain notes, Yahoo didn't include any extra features for searching on any of the metadata.

Exalead Video Search

Simplifying video search, Enterprise Search Center (June 18)

"Exalead has announced a new video search application for its Exalead one:search platform, which gives its users access to millions of video clips indexed from popular online video portals, including YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacare, Vodeo, Kewego and IFILM Web sites. Exalead integrates various categories, such as sports, music, film and entertainment, across multiple platforms, so users can uniformly search for any given item in any category in only one click."

Also see ResearchBuzz - Exalead Adds Video Search for examples of using the video-specific search syntax. Notes that there are 4 million clips. (June 10)

Google buys Panoramio

Google Buys Panoramio, Photo Mapping Software by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (May 31)

"Google announced last night the acquisition of Panoramio to help continue to complete the Google Earth application"

Use Panaramio to map your photos.

Bet they can attach this to Picasa too.

Image Search at Google

Restrict Google Image Results to Faces, News Google Operating System (May 26)

Google Images can detect faces now. Get these by adding &imgtype=face to the end of the url. For example, use this construction -- http://images.google.com/images?q=birds&imgtype=face. See - no birds, just faces.

To restrict to news at Google Images, add &imgtype=news

Exalead Image search also has face detection for images - and you can just specify faces - as we hope will be possible at Google soon too.

Technorati adds videos search

Technorati Blog Search Relaunches by Danny Sullivan, Search engine land (May 23)

Technorati, known as a place for searching for blogs by tag, has relaunched with videos as well as blogs. Move video - what is this obsession with video?

Sullivan wrote, "Sorry to say, my gut reaction to this was to feel like Technorati is just jumping on the same video bandwagon Google is going after. Maybe I'm just sensitive to this today. Earlier, the Google Inside AdSense blog repeated what's become the standard Google mantra: "Video Is Content." This is starting to feel like a guilty apology from Google for seeming to care more about video than textual information."

But that's not the only problem. Technorati has become a tag search place, not a text search.

Blinkx Indexes Travelistic

blinkx Partners with Travelistic to Add Travel and Leisure Related Video to Search Index, PRNewswire via Marketwatch (May 22)

blinkx will be indexing the content of Travelistic.com, a new travel and vacation information video site. "Under the terms of the agreement, blinkx will transcribe and index Travelistic's library of user- generated and professionally produced footage... "

Image Search at the Big Four

Why, Hello There MSN Image Search!, SEOMOZ.org (May 16)

Compares image search at Google, Live, AsK and Yahoo - chooses Live for the "quality of the experience".

Flickr for Image Search

Integrating Flickr Into Yahoo Search WebProNews.com (May 11)

Really about image search - "This move by Yahoo is just the beginning though. In Flickr Yahoo has the best image search technology on the internet right now. And so they'd be crazy not to leverage this advantage as much as possible into Yahoo's search which is still the second player compared to market leader Google. "

Image Search at Ask and Exalead

Exalead Enhancements to Image Search Eric Enge, SEW Blog (May 11)

Lists ways you can narrow an image search at Exalead. Says Exalead's options are even better than Ask's Zoom to narrow a search. But Ask Images supports refining the search by topic, and Exalead Image Search offers refinement by characteristic - size, colour, file type. These are two different methods. The Exalead feature that is really novel is the ability to find faces.

Exalead Image Search

Exalead Adds Image Search, Facial Recognition Capabilities by Chris Sherman, Search Engine Land (May 8)

Brief description - Exalead has 1 billion images - and you can drill down to people's faces.

Save Web Radio

'Fatal' blow to web broadcasters, BBC News (Apr 17)

The U.S. seems intent to levy high royalty fees on webcasters for music they stream.

"If these rates stand... I believe we'll see a virtual shutdown all of US webcasting," wrote Kurt Hanson, CEO of AccuRadio, on the SaveInternetRadio.org blog.

NPR, for example, could be crippled because of the high fees for channels in addition to a fee per song.

Those endorsing the fees are some musicians - American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).

"A campaign called SaveNetRadio.org has now been set up to put pressure on Congress to resolve the problem and "create an environment where Internet radio, and the millions of artists it features, can continue to grow for generations to come.""

Ironic that in the land where free market forces is invoked as a religion, there should be such a heavy fee applied, heavier, claim the webcasters, that commercial radio must bear.

More background at NPR - New Royalty Rules May Reshape Internet Radio by Felix Contreras (March 27)

Online Radio in Canada

Web radio may stream north to Canada by Michael Geist, Toronto Star (Apr 9)

Online radio doesn't get the press of online video, but Geist says it is very popular. There are several forms ranging from program webcasts from niche operators to the create-your-own music streaming from Pandora. However, the U.S. Copyright office set up new royalty fees for operators in the U.S. that could close down many. Will they move their operations to Canada? It could be complicated and costly here too.

Description of Internet Radio:

"Internet radio consists of several types of "stations," including conventional radio stations that simulcast their signal on the Internet, community and college radio stations that use the Internet to extend their signals from small communities to the entire world, and Internet-only stations that broadcast exclusively online.

The Internet-only services are particularly intriguing as they include niche webcasters focused on content not found on mainstream AM/FM stations as well as customizable services such as Pandora and Last.fm, which help users identify new music personalized to their tastes."

Image Search Technology

Teaching Google To See Images by Chris Sherman, Searchengineland (Apr 5)

Image search has been largely dependent on descriptive text accompanying the image. This may change soon.

"Recent work by computer scientists at UC San Diego and tested at Google's data centers has brought the goal of true image analysis and search closer to realization. The senior researcher and author of a recent IEEE paper describing this work believes that these new approaches will ultimately get incorporated into the search engines we use on a daily basis."

Article lists several image search projects and their demo sites.

Blinkx on FindArticles

LookSmart and blinkx.com Announce Partnership in Video Content and Search, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Apr 4)

"blinkx.com to Power Highly Targeted and Relevant Video Search Results on findarticles.com to Increase Audience and Consumption Metrics"

Blinkx Adds JamBase Content

blinkx Partners With JamBase Adding Concert and Music Information to Search Index, PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Apr 2)

+ "blinkx.com will transcribe and index JamBase's content, making it easy for users to find and watch at http://www.blinkx.com."

+ "With more than 100 partners and seven million hours of indexed video and audio content, including favorite TV moments, news clips, short documentaries, music videos, video blogs and more, blinkx uses advanced speech recognition technology to deliver results that are more accurate and reliable than standard metadata-based keyword searches."

Video Search Guide

Video Search Engines And Online Video Directories: A Mini-Guide Robin Good (Jan 25, 2007)

Mini-guide to video finding tools: search engines and directories and the kind of content you can expect to find. Also has information on where you can submit videos.

TV Guide for Video Search

TV Guide to launch video search engine By Gary Gentile, AP via Chicago Tribune (Mar 27)

" Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc. will launch a test version next month of an online video search tool that allows viewers to find clips and full episodes of TV shows now being posted on the Web. A formal launch is planned for September. ... it will scour about 60 Web sites from major networks such as ABC and Fox and other video portals such as AOL and Google to find network and original programming produced by major media companies."

NBC and News Corp Video Distribution

NBC, News Corp. team up to squelch YouTube fire by Grant Robertson, Globe and Mail (Mar 23)

The main story:

Fox owner News Corp., which also owns the popular social networking website MySpace, is partnering with rival network NBC Universal to spawn a competitor to YouTube, the video-posting site that's risen to online dominance in less than two years.

The deal also involves Web giants MSN, AOL and Yahoo as distribution portals for the content and is both defensive and opportunistic for the networks.

The reason is that "broadband is officially the new cable".

But in Canada, we probably won't be able to view these programs because networks have bought the rights to the programs such as 24 and Desperate Housewives.

"The impact on Canada is uncertain for now," Mr. Yigit said. "Chances are the NBC and Fox broadband destination will be geo-blocked. In other words, limited or no access from Canada."

....

In the absence of content deals in Canada, analysts predict audiences here will be driven increasingly to watch pirated copies of shows on YouTube, or by downloading them through other sites. A similar situation is playing out in Europe, Mr. McQuivey said.

But will this really hurt YouTube? Probably not - it gets 130 million visitors a month and the populace rules.

News Corp - NBC online video

YouTube May Have Met Its Match "The News Corp.-NBC online video service could be a worthy rival to Google's popular site—for viewers and content partners alike" by Catherine Holahan, Business Week Online (Mar 23)

News Corp.-NBC video-sharing service takes on YouTube.

"The deal lets Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT), and Time Warner's (TWX) AOL—Google's biggest rivals in search—all broadcast clips and full episodes of popular TV shows from two of the most widely watched networks on TV: NBC and News Corp.'s Fox. The parties will divvy up advertising revenue while their customers get online access to such shows as 24, The Simpsons, The Tonight Show, and My Name Is Earl."

SearchforVideo Adds Newsweek

SearchforVideo.com Adds Newsweek.com Content to Search Index, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Mar 7)

"Searchforvideo.com users can now search and find video from Newsweek.com. Newsweek offers comprehensive coverage of world events with a global network of correspondents, reporters and editors covering national and international affairs, business, science and technology, society and the arts and entertainment."

BBC on YouTube

Google's YouTube To Showcase BBC Content On Three New Channels, Searchengineland (Mar 2)

BBC will be directing some content to YouTube - trailers, archival clips, and news.

State of Video Search

Video Search Challenge Isn't Speech Recognition, It's Content Owner Management, Danny Sullivan, Searchengineland (Feb 20)

This article goes through the history of video search. The main methods have been:

1. Finding video by reading closed-caption or transcript information
2. Finding video by crawling the web
3. Finding video through sharing and rating
4. Finding video by working with content partners

The big change in demand and search for video came with YouTube. It made it easy to find popular entertainment. What will happen as content providers remove that entertainment or put it into its own for-fee vaults? The baton might pass to Blinkx which does a meta-search. "Rather than hosting the content itself, it builds a database of content that is hosted by others from across the web. That helps protect it to some degree from takedown notices."

Article refers to Millions of Videos, and Now a Way to Search Inside Them, by Jason Pontin, New York Times (Feb 25) - about Blinkx and its co-founder, Suranga Chandratillake.

PixsyPower Multimedia Search

Pixsy Launches PixsyPower and PhotoSense, Press Release (Dec 19, 2006)

PixsyPower is a suite of search tools and widgets a webmaster can use to add video search to a website.

"PixsyPower enables bloggers, social networking sites, or any website to run private label photo and video search engines and widgets on their sites by simply signing up for free at PixsyPower.com. Image and video search are the fastest growing search verticals on the web and PixsyPower enables any website publisher to tap into this popular consumer activity within their own site. With three easy steps, Pixsy’s image and video search engine and widgets can be deployed on any website with content customized to the specific topic of their site. ..."

Singing Fish Gone

SingingFish Says So Long, Now Redirects to AOL Video; Truveo Redirects to SearchVideo, ResourceShelf (Feb 13)

Singing Fish, one of the first multimedia search engines, has disappeared into the maw of AOL, no longer operating on its own or being evident in AOL Video Search by the sound of it. It was a wonderful name and a reasonably good search engine.

Classic TV coming to YouTube

YouTube to post classic TV shows, Marketwatch (Feb 12)

This will get the 50-plus people to YouTube. "YouTube Inc. plans to offer more than 4,000 hours of classic television shows, including "I Spy," "Gumby" and other material from Digital Music Group Inc., an online distributor of independently owned music, TV and film catalogs, it was announced Monday."

In return, YouTube will help DMGI identify when songs are used without authorization in videos. There will also be ad revenue from the tv shows.

Blinkx picks up Internet TV

blinkx Partners with Veoh to Make Hundreds of Hours of High Quality User-Generated and Commercial Video Content Fully Searchable, PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Feb 6)

"blinkx, the world's largest video search engine, today announced a partnership with Veoh Networks, the leading innovator in Internet television. blinkx will index thousands of hours of Veoh's broadcast-quality entertainment and information video content and make it easily searchable at www.blinkx.com."

Search For Video Meta Search

Searchforvideo 4.0 Launches With New Design and Video Search Experience, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Feb 6)

"Searchforvideo 4.0 introduces a new website design across several popular video categories that simplifies finding popular online video clips from the world's most trusted video publishers. The next generation site design is intended to promote brand name video content so video publishers can easily connect with Searchforvideo's millions of viewers."

Viacom Off YouTube

Viacom's YouTube Smackdown by Josh Grossberg, E! News (Feb 2)

Viacom has pulled another 100,000 clips from YouTube.

"For the second time in four months, Viacom has demanded that the video-sharing site remove all content from its networks, including MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, VH1, CMT, Spike TV and BET, an estimated 100,000 clips total, after licensing talks broke down."

Google Video - You Tube

Google Video Search Now Includes YouTube Results, Search Engine Land (Jan 25) - has screenshot - refers to a press release - "Google will keep YouTube as an "independent subsidiary" but will continue to build out features within the YouTube community itself as well as with Google products"

Google Images

A Design Change For Google Images, Search engine land (Jan 24) -- changes at Google Images - mainly mouseover image to get properties. Does not show full url until you click on the image. Looks cleaner.

Multimedia Search

Search Every Word Spoken in a Video: From YouTube to the PBS NewsHour, ResourceShelf (Jan 5)

Podzinger has transcript searching. Also mentions TV-Eyes and some other tools for video or audio transcript searching.

Sophisticated Multimedia Search

Are there search engines for image, sound or movie content?, Pandia (Jan 12) -- a few search engines to use for more sophisticated search of images and sounds.

Online Video 2006

Long Live the Net Video Revolution -- Vlogging, citizen journalism, and other facets of the online video phenomenon will shine on in the New Year -- by Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek Online (Jan 2)

"More than 79% of U.S. broadband Internet users watched video in 2006, according to a September eMarketer study. Roughly 32% of all U.S. Internet users said they watched more online video in '06 vs. a year earlier."

Searching for Video

How do People find Video? , iMedia Connection (Dec 15)

Mainly they prefer direct navigation over keyword search - or tips from friends.

"According to the February 2006 OPA study, 50 percent of U.S. online video viewers go to specific websites to watch video, while 48 percent discover videos randomly while on a range of websites (mostly thanks to YouTube and other video sites that make it easy to distribute content across the network). Word of mouth is also an element for finding new online videos, since 42 percent said they click on email links-- which often come from friends, family and co-workers."

Stumble Upon Video

StumbleUpon adds video to its repertoire with StumbleVideo By Josh Lowensohn, WebWare (Dec 14)

StumbleUpon, the social bookmark tool that runs on serendipity, has added a StumbleVideo to get content from YouTube, Google Video, and MySpace.

"This is the perfect service for people who don't want to spend time sorting through the chaff that tends to find its way onto the most-watched list of major video providers."

Humming Search

If you can hum it, Nayio might find it By Rafe Needleman, WebWare (Dec 13) - Hum a tune into your computer mic and Humming Search might be able to identify it. Works on IE and requires installing the Humming Search Client. Cool.

Mamma - Meta-video-search

Mamma.com Launches New Video Search Engine "This venture enables Mamma.com Users to Search and Discover Millions of Broadband Videos", CCNMatthews via Marketwatch (Dec 12)

Mamma with Pixsy Media Search Platform has a video metasearch engine that picks up videos from "the web including YouTube, Revver, StupidVideos.com, AddictingClips.com, Blastro, BusinessWeek, Grouper, MetaCafe, Reuters, Sharkle, Roo Media, USA Today, and many more."

Some International Content at Searchforvideo

Searchforvideo.com Launches First Phase of International Video Podcast Directory - Video Search Engine Simplifies Finding and Downloading International Video Podcasts, Marketwatch (Dec 12)

SearchforVideo has added international content under Podcasts. There is some news from BBC, and Comedy has Channel 4. You can also select Francais or Deutsch podcasts (at bottom of page).
"The first phase of the international video podcast directory provides access to the most popular video podcasts from Germany and France. Specific video podcast categories include news, comedy, television, film, arts, science and technology. International video podcast producers can submit their podcasts for review and inclusion in the directory for free. In the coming months, additional languages will be considered for the international video podcast directory."

Competition for YouTube?

Media giants discuss YouTube rival again: WSJ online, Marketwatch (Dec 9)

"Four major media companies are again discussing the possibility of creating a video Web site to compete with Google' Inc's YouTube, the Wall Street Journal online reported Saturday." They are News Corp's Fox, Viacom, CBS, and GE's NBC Universal.

"The media companies believe YouTube has built the foundations for its business of their video content, with many of its most popular clips pirated copies of television shows."

PureVideo metasearch

Meta-Search for Video Content: PureVideo Search, ResearchBuzz (Nov 14) - PureVideo is new, searches many video sites, and has channels. Calishain finds it incomplete but the results are "decent".

Online Video Search

Video search engines worth a peek -- Commentary: Today viewing, tomorrow finding by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Nov 14)

"As the online video world explodes with everything from amateur snippets to full-length features, new search engines are crawling, tagging and organizing the visual data."

Describes several tools and notes differences: CastTV, Dabble.com, Pixsy, Nexidia.

As well there is PureVideo (metasearch), Podzinger for audio, Yahoo Video, AOL Video (which bought Truveo), Blinkx.

These and others are also described in Video Search Made the Internet Star By Elisabeth Osmeloski, SearchDay (Nov 14)

Online Video Search

Finding Footage by Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal via San Diego Union-Tribune (Nov 13)

Video search engines have mainly used text on page and file names to find videos on topics. But there are some new imaging and speech-recognition technologies. And some video search engines are teaming up with new partners for content.

+ Blinkxtv - "uses speech-recognition and visual-analysis technology to help compile results".
+ Metacafe Inc. - "search algorithms tailored to different languages and countries."
+ PureVideo Networks Inc. - "feeds from hundreds of video sites"
+ AOLVideo - has improved search through “contextual” data and can "translate a video's audio into easily searchable text".

Video is very popular - "U.S. Internet users streamed more than 7 billion videos in July, according to comScore Networks Inc. MySpace.com captured the largest share, followed by Yahoo and YouTube. But when measured by overall traffic, YouTube holds the top spot, with 46 percent of visits among the top sites tracked by market researcher Hitwise."

Copyright and Google Video

Google's Online Video Service Sued , By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP via Topix (Nov 8)

Just as many predicted -- "Google Inc.'s online video service has been sued for copyright infringement, providing a possible preview of the legal trouble that may plague the Internet search leader after it takes over YouTube Inc. and its library of pirated clips, the company said Wednesday."

Hockey Games on Google Video

With one shot at the Net, it's all about new fans by Richard Blackwell, Globe Technology (Nov 4)

Google Video will have NHL games, recent ones and some classics. NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises, the digital arm of the National Hockey League, is looking for ways to make hockey more popular (in the US it would seem), and possibly make some revenue from its vast archives.

"Dozens of recent games can now be downloaded, along with a selection of classic contests ranging from the 1967 Toronto-Montreal Stanley Cup final to the Vancouver Canuck's loss to the New York Rangers in the 1994 Cup final.

The material is free, for now, until the NHL decides whether it will try to generate revenue by charging for the downloads, or by selling advertising, or a combination of the two. "

Searchforvideo adds video from Forbes

SearchforVideo.com Adds Forbes.com Video Network Content to Search Index, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Oct 17)

"Searchforvideo.com users can now search and find video from the Forbes.com video network which features a broad range of categories including top shows, business, lifestyle, investing, people, special interest and technology."

Multimedia Search

From Niall Kennedy's weblog, two excellent articles on multimedia search.

The current state of audio search (Oct 15) -- "In this post I will outline the current state of audio search, and how machines make sense of spoken word, progressing from easy to difficult." Covers different audio formats and speech-to-text conversion.

The current state of image search (Oct 14) -- "In this post I will outline image search concepts, the current state of the art, and outline some of the challenges with still image search."

News Photos

Resources for Finding Real-Time “News Photos” on the Web, ResourceShelf (Oct 15) - suggests Yahoo News, Ask, and Lycos.

Search for Free Images

Yotophoto For Finding Free Photos Fast, by Phil Bradley, SEW Blog (Sep 29)

"The focus of Yotophoto however is on making 'open and copyleft' images available to educators, bloggers and digital artists. Consequently Yotophoto acts as a multi/meta search engine, scouring resources such as Flickr, Wikipedia, Stock.Xchng, Morguefile, Pixelperfect Digital and OpenPhoto for images in the public domain, or made available under CC, GNU FDL or similar licenses."

Google - YouTube

GoogTube, the neutral network "Commentary: Google's biggest deal yet is its riskiest -- and smartest" By Bambi Francisco, Marketwach (Oct 9)

"Buying the privately-held YouTube, which boasts 34 million unique visitors a month, instantly makes Google and properties one of the three most-visited sites in the rapidly growing video-sharing segment of the Web."

Online Photo and Video Editing

Shutterfly ready to go shopping "Commentary: Or maybe it's the other way around", Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Oct 3)

Examines Shutterfly as a candidate for being bought by One True Media. Article is interesting for what it has to say about a the boom in emerging online photo and video sites. Shutterfly is one of many photo editing and sharing sites. One True Media is a photo-and-video-editing site.

BL Archival Sound Recordings

Breaking the sound barrier -- "Massive digitisation programme by the British Library and JISC makes 3,900 hours of historic sound recordings available to students, researchers and academics" - "The [ Archival Sound Recordings ] ASR service is accessible to any web user, but access to the audio content will be limited to password-authenticated members of the UK HE and FE communities."

Online Video Sharing

The online video race by Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Sep 27) - competition between My Space and YouTube for online video sharing - and there are more to come. Refers to article by Bambi Francisco -- MySpace trumps YouTube in video Commentary: Talk is cheap with videos, and cell phones

UCBerkeley Google Video

Google Shows Berkeley Lectures "Search giant’s video service will deliver educational content from California." Red Herring (September 27, 2006)

University of California, Berkeley is making 250 hours of video available to Google Video that will include lectures and symposia. This will be viewable from a UCBerkeley Google Video page.

"The Berkeley web page will include a half dozen courses from the university in their entirety, including “Physics for Future Presidents,” “Integrative Biology,” and “Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business, ...”

For example, there is Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, lecturing on Search, Google, and Life. (Oct 2005)

SoapBox for video sharing

Microsoft launches Soapbox, its YouTube competitor by Rafe Needleman, CNet (Sep 2006) - read the review and watch the video to see how Microsoft's Soapbox works and compares to YouTube.

MSN Soapbox

MSN's YouTube clone Commentary: Can this old-timer compete? by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Sep 19) -- MSN is launching Soapbox as a video social network in direct competition to the popular YouTube. Currently Soapbox is in beta and available by invitation only. (How many of these sites can video addicts use?)

Of interest: "YouTube, which is as much as a social network and place to blog about yourself, will give you eyeballs. The site attracted 34 million monthly unique visitors and 1.2 billion page views in August. This compares to Google's blog hosting service, Blogger, which commanded 19 million unique visitors and a mere 289 million pageviews, and MSN's blog called, MSN Spaces, which drew 8.2 million unique visitors and a very low 69 million pageviews. "

Viral Video

Searchforvideo.com Launches New Online Viral Video Guide , Business Wire via Marketwatch (Aug 30)

" The new viral video guide makes it easier to uncover funny, bizarre and entertaining video from across the web. It includes links to the most popular viral video categories including stunts, fights, commercials, crashes, chasing and pranks and anime. The online viral video guide will be built out in the coming months to include new channels as determined by searchforvideo users."

http://www.searchforvideo.com/channel/viral.jsp

Video on Saving Internet Video

CNET Insider Secrets - Save Internet Video by Molly Wood - video show on websites and tools that will help you save videos to your computer - where to go, what to do.

Google Video Supplants Froogle

Google removes text link to Froogle AP via Globe and Mail (Aug 14) -- Google.com replaced its link to the comparison shopper Froogle with one to Google Video where all the heat is these days. John Battelle opined that ""The fact is that YouTube is hot, video is hot, and there's a lot of money projected to be shifted from video advertising on TV to video advertising on the Web ... ""

Online Video Growth

Online Video Growth to Continue by ENid Burns, Clickz (Aug 3)

A new report from In-Stat sees increased demand for video that will give content aggregators and portals more revenue generating opportunities.

"Content aggregators, including portals like AOL, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, and providers like Apple, are in the early stages of providing video services. "The worldwide market for online content services is expected to expand by a factor of 10, growing from about 13 million households during 2005 to over 131 million households by 2010," said the report."

AOL Video

AOL Previews One-Stop Video Portal, Adotas (July 31)

"This week, AOL will be launching a beta version of the AOL Video portal. The portal, available at www.aolvideo.com, allows users to find, watch, and share millions of videos across the Web."

Online Video

Video enablers I've noticed - Commentary: It's about mash-ups, control, incentives, by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Aug 1)

This is the year that will be remembered for online video. Francisco names several trends including "YouTube is one of the fastest-growing Web sites, drawing 100 million views a day. Akamai Technologies, which helps deliver online video, has watched its shares surge 90% this year. Limelight, a private version of Akamai, is seeing sales grow 40% year-over-year, reflecting its growing client base of publishers and producers who want to deliver video and need technology to help deliver it faster and cheaper. "

YouTube and Copyright

Whose Video Is It, Anyway? by Heather Green, Business Week Online (Jul 26) -- "YouTube's runaway success has opened a Pandora's box of copyright issues"

YouTube, the video-sharing center, was sued for copyright infringement in July by Robert Tur, an independent photographer.

"The dustup spotlights the role the Internet increasingly is playing in letting artists and other individuals reach out and control media. But more to the point, it shows how YouTube is evolving into a sort of eBay (EBAY) for video: the first place you go to find a clip, but also a place where more folks are itching to get rewarded for supplying it. A growing group of creative types is furiously producing clips, video blogs, and animated shorts with the hopes of making money through advertising or selling DVDs."

Search for Video 3.0

Searchforvideo 3.0 Available With New Design and Video Search Experience, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jul 25)

"Searchforvideo 3.0 introduces a new website design across several popular video categories simplifying the discovery and viewing of free online video clips. Each video category displays more video clips, video publishers and updates more frequently throughout the day as new video links are found and posted to the site."

Blinkx and the History Channel

blinkx Partners with the History Channel UK Giving Users Access to Historical Programming on the Web -- Content Agreement Allows Users to Search Hours of Historical Audio and Video Content, PRNewswire via Marketwatch (July 3)

"blinkx's unique search technology connects users to The History Channel UK's wide range of audio and video content including a variety of historical audio clips including speeches from icons such as Franklin Roosevelt, JFK, Albert Einstein and Neil Armstrong as well as The History Channel UK's video picks of the week."

Unfortunately, it's not easy to browse or search Blinkx. You can select a group of sources or an individual source. Blinkx searches everything that has a green radial button. Click on groups to de-select. Then use the search box. The History Channel is listed under Entertainment.

Image Search and other Hacks at Flickr

Hacking Flickr by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 21)

"You can do a lot more with Yahoo's popular photo sharing site Flickr than simply upload your own photos and browse images created by other users. A new book in O'Reilly's popular "Hacks" series shows you how." The book is Flickr Hacks , by Paul Bausch and Jim Bumgardner- has fifty tips and tricks for using Flickr. The O'Reilly site has some sample Flickr hacks.

Searchforvideo uses editors

Searchforvideo.com Introduces New Editorial Team to Uncover the Web's Most Popular Online Video; Video Search Engine Leaps Ahead of Competition with Ability to Seek out Wider Range of New Interesting Content Faster Than Other Tools, Business Wire via Marketwatch (June 20)

"FUSA's Searchformedia Network, which includes the popular video discovery and sharing site www.searchforvideo.com , will leverage both software intelligence and human editors to identify popular and entertaining videos. This combination will provide the company with the ability to spot breakthrough videos and popular trends quicker than is typically possible today. As the team includes editors from a wide range of cultural backgrounds and knowledge specialties, this move will also help the organization ensure that it offers users access to online video from the widest possible range of topics, categories and languages."

Music Recommendations

Music search sites that learn your taste, by Adam Pasick, Reuter News via Yahoo News (June 23) - Describes Pandora and Last.fm as music recommendation services. Has a few others.

Image Searching

An Alternative Interface to Google’s Image Search, ResearchBuzz (June 14) - Imagery is an alternative way to search Google's images. Works with Firefox 1.5.

Image Search by Pattern

retrievr: Image Search by Color and Pattern, Greg Notess, SearchEngineShowdown (June 5) - about Retrievr, an experimental image search engine for finding images that are similar in colour or pattern.

Searchforvideo has new homepage

Searchforvideo.com Launches New Design and Popular Category Zones, Business Wire via Marketwatch (June 8)

"Searchforvideo.com is an online video search portal that aggregates freely available video links from over 6000 public sources.

The new homepage design is intended to make it easier for users to discover and view free online video selections from automated software agents and human editors. As part of the new site design, there are several new category sections that highlight and recommend videos for users. Some sections are updated daily while some are updated hourly depending on the popularity amongst users. "

YouTube Channels

YouTube channeling its users, by Andrew Wallenstein, Reuters via Yahoo News (June 5)

"YouTube's members are now able to become their own channels -- though not in the traditional definition of the word. Instead of providing a linear video feed, a YouTube channel allows a member to aggregate programming of their own creation or offer a collection of programs from other sources. The change will encourage the formation of communities around successful channels, be they content creators or collectors."

"YouTube registers 50 million views and 50,000 video uploads each day." WOW

New Yahoo Video

Yahoo introduces improved video service -- "New Yahoo site makes it easier for Web users to find and share videos", Infoworld (June 1)

"The site builds on Yahoo's existing video search capability and will compete with video search services from Google, AOL, Microsoft's MSN, and other video-sharing sites like YouTube.com and MySpace.com.

Visitors to video.yahoo.com can store their favorite videos, browse based on category, and upload their own videos to the site. Site visitors can review and rate videos and also embed the Yahoo Video player in their own Web sites or blogs to share videos. "

Also described in detail in ResourceShelf -- Web Search - Yahoo (May 31)

YouTube Video Spreads

Yahoo Video to compete with Google and YouTube, By Chris Nuttall, FT.com via MSNBC (June 1)

"Yahoo is taking on Google and start-up YouTube with a service that allows users to upload and share their videos."

Update on what these three are doing. Probably good for 1 week.

ROO Video Search

ROO Introduces Video Search Engine - "New Features Allow Viewers to Easily Search 300+ Hours of Video News and Entertainment Content for Broadband TV Viewing", MarketWire via Marketwatch (May 30)

"The ROO Video Search Engine is available at http://search.roo.com , and will provide instantaneous search results through ROO's exclusive library of more than 7,000 videos, allowing visitors to quickly search and access breaking news, favorite artists' music videos and health news updates 24 hours a day. ROO Search is one of the first search engines on a syndicated video network and serves as a gateway to all the videos in the ROO library across 130+ affiliate web sites. These include Verizon Broadband Beat, Excite, iWon, Bulldog Broadband (a Cable & Wireless company), News.com.au in Australia, 36 local U.S. television station websites and a variety of targeted lifestyle destination sites such as Music.com, Rock.com, VegTV and more."

Video Search

Video Search: YouTube Dominates, Google Video No. 5 by Ben Charny, PUblish (May 24)

"YouTube continues to dominate the Internet video search market, according to a new report. ... MySpace Videos is second with 24.2 percent of the video search traffic, Yahoo Video Search third with 9.58 percent and MSN Video Search fourth at 9.21 percent. Google Video, in fifth place, has a 6.48 percent share."

Visual Image Search

Searching for Images by Similarity, by Chris SHerman, SearchDay (May 23)

The new Tiltomo image search engine will be able to help you find images at Flickr that are similar to a selected one by its characteristics. Options are to search by Theme : Analysis of (Subject / Color / Texture) or Color / Texture : Analysis of (100% Color / Texture). Tiltormo wasn't working when I tried it - didn't show any images not even the examples provided - but maybe later.

The Canadian company Idée also creates the visual search software Epsion -- http://www.ideeinc.com/. You can see it at work at Wonderfile , a service for finding royalty free stock photographs.

MSN Photo Searching

Microsoft Shoots for Photo Search By Ben Charny, eWeek (April 14, 2006)

"Microsoft this week revealed that it is at work on a way to search the Internet using photos captured by cell phone cameras.

So rather than typing in an Internet search query, someone can e-mail Microsoft a photo of what they're searching for. Photo2Search, as Microsoft calls the nascent feature, returns Web pages either with information about the objects in the photo, or sites that contain similar images. "

Video Channels

Why big search engines are in trouble -- Commentary: And, other implications of the splintered Net -- by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Apr 18) -- More young people are watching the video channels, and the more they do so, the lower the traffic at the main search engines. Article lists several Web video channels like OurMedia.org, Podzinger.com, Current.tv.

YouTube for Videos

Now starring on the Internet: YouTube.com by Michael Liedtke, AP via Business Week (Apr 9) -- Everywhere you turn on the Web these days, someone is talking about YouTube , considered a "leading video-sharing site".

"It's become an outlet for sharing everything from amateur videos made by teenagers goofing off to slick productions posted by the likes of Nike Inc., MC Hammer and the director of the upcoming movie "Superman Returns" to drum up demand for their products."

Every day people are posting about 35,000 videos and watching audience 35 million of them. It may have to deal with a few issues such as porn and copyright.

Pixsy for Image Search

A Few Minutes with Relaunched Image Search Engine: Pixsy ResourceShelf (Apr 5) -- detailed look at Pixsy with sample searches for image and video. Conclusion -- "Overall, Pixsy search is an interesting idea that needs a lot more work to make it truly useful. The availability of more imagery via RSS will also help." Lists three others that are preferred.

Search for IPod Video Content

Searchforipod.com Launches Online Video Player with over 1,000 Video Content Sources, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Apr 5)

"Searchforipod.com is a free online video download community that aggregates and organizes iPod(TM) enabled video content from over 1,000 independent sources and makes it searchable through various content channels and traditional keyword search. The searchforipod video player lets users easily watch one video or a customized playlist of videos on the web before they make the decision to download a respective video or video playlist to a video iPod(TM)."

RSS Image Search

Pixsy unveils visual Web search by Stephanie Olsen, ZDNet (Apr 3)

"A picture can be worth a thousand words, but an RSS feed is worth a million pictures. That's the virtual promise of Pixsy, a visual search engine that scours syndication feeds (in the format of Really Simple Syndication) for up-to-date images and then makes them searchable. "

It's really search by photo.

Rocketnews picks up audio and video

Audio, Video News & Podcast Search Added to Rocketnews.com - Market Wire via Marketwatch (Mar 16)

Rocketnews has added audio/podcast and video search to its choices for searching news. Top stories are shown on each of the topical home pages. This makes it quite easy to pick out headlines for technology, arts and literature, health etc.

"The video and podcast content accessible on Rocketnews is aggregated from authoritative news outlets such as CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, Reuters, and the BBC, along with thousands of online audio news sources and podcasts. Visitors to the Rocketnews portal can now search for news, blog, audio, video and podcast content. The Company has also created a simple taxonomy that gives users the ability to narrow their searches to content from business, technology, health, sports and entertainment sources. Rocketinfo will continue to aggressively grow its audio, video and podcast databases."

Full-text Audio Search

Google Video's Achilles' Heel by Matt Rand, Forbes (Mar 10) -- This article is about full-text audio search services, something which Google isn't but TVEyes with Podscope, BBN with Podzinger, and Blinkx are. There is also a list of the 8 "elite" video-search engines.

Online Video Directory

Searchforvideo.com Launches Comprehensive Video Directory. Business Wire via Marketwatch (Mar 8)

"As more video content becomes available online, consumers are increasingly turning to online video as an alternative to TV. However, searching for interesting videos to watch is not a simple task as channel surfing on your television. "We frequently analyze consumer usage and feedback on searchforvideo.com and it is clear that the majority of users still find it difficult to express what they are searching for using keywords," says Tom St. John, CTO. Searchforvideo.com has launched their video directory to provide consumers with a more efficient way to find online videos."

Searchforvideo is a great new directory site for finding video on the Web. There are categories for news, technology, sports, entertainment, business, health and something called viral, which may have something to do with popularity.

Finding Music

Resource-of-the-Week at Resourceshelf featured web resources for the music fan. (Feb 16)

Historic Film on the Web

Places where you can find historic film and video content are described in a posting at the ResourceShelf (Feb 24). It opens with the announcement that Google will be digitizing historic film from the US National Archives and making it available through Google Video.

Blinkx for Video Search

Blinkx eyes up video search market by Graeme Wearden, ZDNet UK (Feb 8) - Interview with Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of Blinkx.

-- Sees an end to desktop search: "Desktop search is a pretty boring business to be in. It's becoming commoditised, and it will be a non-industry within the next 12 months. That functionality is getting built into the operating system now. It's very hard to persuade users to download extra tools when the operating system does the job so well."

-- Has a deal with TV News Network ITN to put video online : "The deal with ITN that we're announcing this week is our first source of revenue. We'll be pursuing similar relationships with other content partners. We'll also be looking at distribution. Now we have the content, we need to raise our profile."

Internet TVEyes Search

TVEyes makes Internet TV searchable, Pandia (Jan 31) TVEyes , using the Podscope search engine, indexes the sound track of TV programs. It says it picks up Internet television from United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Al Jazeera. (However, a search for Stephen Harper didn't pick up any Canadian sources.)

Reviewed in Searching Television News by Gary Price, SearchDay (Feb 6)

Image Search at Ask Jeeves

Ask Jeeves Launches Proprietary Image Search Technology Industry-Leading Relevance and Image-Specific Zoom Related Search Provide Superior Image Search Experience Image Search Now Accounts for 16 Percent of All Searches on Ask.com , PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Jan 24)

"Ask Jeeves, Inc. today announced the launch of its first proprietary image search technology, available on Ask Jeeves at http://pictures.ask.com . The new technology debuts Ask Jeeves' first internally-created index of Web images, further improvements to its image search ranking algorithms and new Zoom related search suggestions specifically for image searching. "

Chris Sherman reviewed the new Ask Jeeves image search favourably in Searching For a Better Image (Jan 26). It seems to use additional ranking factors including Teoma's ranking system for authority, and to make some sense from characteristics of the images. As well it offers Zoom - suggestions for alternate terms.

Video Search

Video Search: Still "Early Days" by Greg Jarboe, Searchday (Jan 17) - report on session at the Search Engine Strategies Conference - "this session featured three executives from video search engines: Suranga Chandratillake, the co-founder and CTO of blinkx, John Thrall, head of Multi-Media Search Engineering at Yahoo! Search, and Karen Howe, vice president of AOL Search and General Manager of Singingfish. The session also featured one expert in video search from a full-service interactive agency: Jon Leicht, Senior Project Manager at SiteLab International."

Blinkx gets British TV

blinkx Brings the Best of British TV to the Web - blinkx Partners With UKTV to Make Hundreds of Hours of Lifestyle TV Watchable and Searchable Online - PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jan 17)

"The agreement will make online clips from UKTV Style, UKTV Style Gardens and UKTV Food available and searchable for the first time at www.blinkx.tv."

Video and Film Downloads

Searching for Online Video by Gary Price, SearchDay (Jan 10) - selection of sources for downloading video and films in the U.S.

Google to sell video

Google to sell video from CBS, NBA: Report, AP via Globe Technology (Jan 5)

"Google Inc. will let consumers buy video over the Internet from CBS, the NBA and other providers, becoming the latest company to explore the new method of distributing TV content, according to a report Thursday."

Blinkx TV for Video

BusinessWeek Online Selects blinkx for 'Best of the New Web' www.blinkx.tv Recognized in Editors' Picks for Best Video Sites , PR Newswire (Dec 13)

Press release describes Blinkx.tv - "Bringing together material from broadcast pioneers such as Reuters, Fox News, and iFilm, as well as several specialist content providers, blinkx has established itself as the place to find and access over 500,000 hours of high quality video footage on demand. "

GoFish at Ask.com

Ask Jeeves and GoFish Sign Content Licensing Agreement - Leading Search Provider Chooses GoFish for Multimedia-Related Content MarketWire via Marketwatch (Nov 22) - Ask.com picks up GoFish for multimedia content.

Blinkx adds University Channel

Blinkx includes audio content from universities - Net Imperative (Nov 16)

"Search engine blinkx has formed agreements with several universities and an educational content partnership with the University Channel, to make hundreds of hours of academic audio content."

Select University Channel from the left side panel to search only it (means de-selecting the others.)

Related - blinkx Offers Gateway to Riches of History of Culture with Searchable Content from the Smithsonian, blinkx (Nov 18)

To see what Blinkx has collected, select the University Channel (as above) and search on smithsonian.

Ask for music

Ask updates music and video game features Net Imperative (Nov 4) Ask Jeeves has new smart answers for video game and music related searches.

"Ask Jeeves has also partnered with All Music Guide, providing musician and band biographies, discographies, lyrics, pictures, and product price comparisons." Has an entry for the band BareNaked Ladies.

Blinkx.tv Growing

blinkx.tv Comes of Age With One Million Hours of Video Content, 500,000 SmartFeeds Daily "Rapid Growth of User-Generated and Commercial Content Sees blinkx.tv Getting Ahead of Its Years and the Competition", PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Nov 8)

Blinkx.tv has over 1 million hours of TV clips as well as hundreds of thousands of user-created video blogs and podcasts.

"... blinkx added popular new features such as SmartFeed and my blinkx.tv to its service. For example, users who want to go way beyond watching traditional broadcast content can now create and view their own "selfcasts" through my blinkx.tv and watch a single personalized media stream featuring clips which other users have uploaded to the service."

Guba Multimedia Search

New Multimedia Search Finds Terabytes of Content on 'The Dark Web' Press Release via Yahoo (Nov 2) - Guba.com finds multimedia content from Usenet, the old bulletin board system. Seems like a timewarp, but supposedly Usenet is still a place for finding these files.

"For video and images alone, GUBA indexes 300,000 files per day from Usenet -- that is the equivalent of one image or video every .3 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Content found on GUBA is available for download at the maximum speed of a subscriber's connection."

Good idea to keep the Safe Search filters when browsing Guba.

AOL Video adds RSS feeds

AOL Bolsters Video Offerings With New RSS Feeds Online Media Daily (Oct 27) - AOL is adding RSS feeds to its video search engine from sources such as Forbes.com, PC World, and music video aggregator Blastro.com. Article has more on AOL's Singingfish and AOL Video.

Images from NYPL

Search for images at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery Pandia Search (Oct 29) - about the Digital Gallery of the New York Public Library and availability of images for free download for personal use. There are 376,000 images, all very well organized.

Podcasting

Yahoo Gains Podcast Directory by Danny SUllivan, SEW blog (Oct ) -- Compares the new Yahoo podcast directory (with search engine) to Odeo with tags and featured channels.

Also, New PodSpider Search Engine Delivers Largest Directory of Podcasts in English, Breaks Barrier of 20,000 Podcasts PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 6) -- PodSpider Portal from RapidSolution Software offers a directory to 20,000 podcasts in English categorized into 25 subject areas and 300 categories.

For background on Podcasting, see Podcasting explained, Anchordesk (Oct 5)

Video Search

Video and Podcast Search Engines by Grant Crowell, Searchday (Oct 11)

In this session at the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 8-11, 2005, several vendors spoke about their multimedia search engines: Singingfish, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Blinkx. Also mentions Yahoo's audio search and its podcast directory.

Flash for Google Video

Google Video Gets Flashy Search Engine Watch blog (Sep 26) Google Video is now using Adobe Flash to show its videos. New method is seen as better viewing, more control, and faster searching.

AOL Podcast Search

AOL launches podcast search Net Imperative (Sept 14) AOL Search will be adding the Podcast search engine - "Podscope creates a spoken word index for every word in audio and video files, makes the files searchable in the same manner as text pages on the Web."

Multimedia Search

SearchWebMedia is a new search engine for multimedia content on the Web, free, and commercial - it claims. Comes from GoFish.

Try Diana Krall- get albums, tracks, playlists, as well as search results from Google. Of course all of those tracks come with a price.

GoFish Launches Web Media Search ResearchBuzz (Sept 14)

YotoPhoto

Search Engine of Free, GNU FDL, Creative Commons Images ResearchBuzz (Sept 7) - Reviews Yotophoto for free photos.

From the web site - " Yotophoto is the first and only internet search engine for finding free-to-use stock photographs and images" - though check the exact usage license first.

Yahoo Audio Video Search

Finding your media on the Web by Dana Greenlee, Tacoma Daily Index (Sept 2) - Interviewed Bradley Horowitz, Yahoo's Director of Technology Development for Search, about Yahoo's audio and video search. She explained that for files with audio - "We’re doing speech recognition. We take these media assets and run them through a speech recognizer and pull out descriptive text. The publisher of the content needs to describe the media assets and get them into an index: title, author, keywords, description -- things that make it findable. "

DANA GREENLEE
By Dana Greenlee, Technology Columnist

Yahoo Audio Search

A Closer Look at Yahoo Audio Search by Gary Price, SearchDay (Aug 23) - Very thorough review of Yahoo Audio Search - "... a one-stop, comprehensive service that allows the user to search, find, and access both open web audio files (via a Yahoo crawl) AND audio files from numerous music/audio (fee-based) services ... ". Price describes in detail what you can do and what defects to be aware of. Article also mentions other specialized music databases.

Blinkx for multimedia search

Multimedia search sorts messy web by Jo Twist, BBC News (July 22)

"Finding video and audio on the net is getting easier as more companies look to automated ways of delivering specific content to people's computers."

Blinkx is way ahead in multimedia search compared to Google and Yahoo because it uses "smart voice recognition technology to scan video and audio it finds on the web:.

Yahoo Audio Search

Yahoo! Search Debuts Audio Search, the Largest Audio Index on the Web Today; Offers Users the Most Extensive and Open Audio Index on the Web With More Than 50 Million Audio Files Including Music Downloads, Podcasts, Spoken Word and More, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Aug 4)

"Yahoo! Audio Search provides access to a variety of audio files including podcasts, music downloads, albums and spoken word such as newscasts, speeches, and interviews, as well as other audio related information including music videos, album reviews, artist images and artists websites. Yahoo! Audio Search is currently available through Yahoo! Next at http://next.yahoo.com as well as http://audio.search.yahoo.com."

Also see review at SEW Blog - Yahoo Releases Audio Search Engine by Gary Price (Aug 4) -- was impressed but hopes for improvements.

Podcasting cool and hip

Firms lining up to capitalize on podcasting phenomenon by Tim Lia, Globe and Mail (Jul 18) - coverage of podcasting never lets up - in this article we see that companies are getting into this broadcast mode. "Walt Disney Co. was one of the first companies to use podcasts. TV Guide, Nestlé Purina PetCare Company and even NASA are among companies producing regular podcasts." Doug Kaye, executive producer of IT Conversations in California, says that companies are doing this to appear "cool and hip" and that the podcasts "must be inspirational, educational and entertaining, or face deaf ears."

Three pioneering podcasters are:

+ TV Guide http://www.tvguide.com/news/podcast+ Purina Pet Care http://downloads/podcast.aspx+ BMC Software http://talk.bmc.com/podcasts

Blinkx adds Smartfeeds

Blinkx Bows RSS Feeds For Video by Gavin O'Malley, MediaPost ( Jul 19, 2005)

"Blinkx today is expected to introduce "SmartFeed," a free RSS service that enables users to receive continual automatic rich media updates from any potential video and/or audio source. "SmartFeeds gives users a TiVo-like level of control over their media online, which will only improve as the content available online improves," Suranga Chandratillake, founder of Blinkx, said."

Podcasting

Podcasting Spurs a Media 'Land Grab' "Podcasting, Seen As Next Big Web Craze, Spurs 'Land Grab' Among Media Companies" By GREG SANDOVAL,
The Associated Press - ABC News (Jul 17)

Podcastalley.com, Podcast.net and the new Odeo.com are three services helping users understand and use podcasts, both creating and hearing.

Odeo encourages podcasters to upload their shows on its site. Recognizing that one of the main complaints about podcasting is the difficulty of finding them, Odeo organizes the shows by genre. Odeo's headings includes arts, food, religion, sex, and technology. There is even a one called "weird."

Main challenge will be in getting the music rights and collecting licensing fees.

Podcasting Tips

Podcasting Easy for Everyone by Julliette Wallack, AP via Globe and Mail (Jul 15) - Young woman and real newbie at podcasting does her first podcast.

"Sure enough, podcastalley.com had the best tips for beginners, including a link to free sound-editing software I could download. Audacity, the best free program I could find, worked seamlessly with my mike and offered lots features more than I would need, including the option of using multiple tracks (in case I wanted to fade music in and out, for example). Audacity is available for both Windows and Mac OS X."

Podcasting hot

Podcasting audience to skyrocket: Study by Jack Kapica, Globe Technology (July 6)

Podcasting - to create audio files somewhat in a blogging style and transmit them as MP3 files to subsribers - is becoming very popular. Some networks such as ABC, NBC, MSNBC and CNBC are using podcasts to over their newscasts via downloads.

"The Diffusion Group's report called Podcasting: Fact, Fiction and Opportunity says demand for these time-shifted digital audio files is expected to grow from less than 15 per cent of portable digital music player owners in 2004 to 75 per cent during the next five years, a compound annual growth rate of 101 per cent.)"

AOL Video on Beta

AOL does video search By Stefanie Olsen, CNet (July 4)

"The beta service, called AOL Video, offers free access to search and playback for more than 15,000 licensed and originally produced video assets from Time Warner, including television programmes and music videos, movie trailers from Warner Bros and news clips from CNN, MSNBC and others. AOL's Singingfish multimedia search engine, which the company acquired two years ago, will complement the new service by pointing visitors to audio and video from across the web."

Access it from the AOL Beta start page - http://startpage.aol.com/beta.adp - and select the video tab for searching.

Blinkx.tv adds podcasts and video blogs

blinkx Makes Podcasts and Video Blogs Fully Searchable for the First Time
Adding to Rich Array of News and Entertainment Sources, blinkx.tv Unveils Channels for Podcast and Video Blog Content PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jun 29)

"In addition to offering a wealth of news and entertainment content, blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer and on the Web, has added Podcast and Video Blog channels to www.blinkx.tv, making these two sources fully searchable for the first time. Bringing thousands of hours of podcasting and video blogging to a single destination, www.blinkx.tv will find user-generated rich media by simultaneously spidering the Internet, and enabling users to upload their own content to the service."

Google Video

Google rolls out viewer for video search site Reuters via Yahoo News (Jun 27) Google has true video now (not just the stills from television programs) but you'll need their Video player to view them. Requires Windows 2000 or higher and Firefox 1.0+ or IE 5+ browsers.

"Videos from CNET's (Nasdaq:CNET - news) GameSpot.com, Link TV, Greenpeace and UNICEF, among others, are also now available for viewing.

Google has still photos of video clips from more than 20 television stations available on its site. Partners on its project include ABC, NBC, CNN, The Weather Channel and Fox News."

Also read Google Adds Playback to Video Search by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jun 27)

"Google Video search looks at metadata encoded with the video. Chane said many videos were also submitted with transcripts and annotations that are time-coded, allowing playback to begin at the point where your search terms are located in clips. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well."

More Q&A With Google Video Manager in SEW blog on June 27 - additional information from conversation Danny Sullivan had with Peter Chane, senior product manager for Google Video.

BlinkxTV and Forbes

blinkx to Offer Search and Indexing Service for Forbes.com Video Content "Web Users Can Now Search for Forbes.com Video Content on blinkx.tv ", PRNewswire via Marketwatch [subscription] (June 20)

Blinkx has added videos with business news to blinkx.tv.

"blinkx is the only search engine that is optimized for rich media. blinkx uses voice recognition software to transcribe the content of audio and video segments, so that users can search by words or phrases to find the exact broadcast material they're looking for."

Press release also describes the Context Clustering Technology (CCT) technology blinkx uses to get past straight keyword matches.

CNN Video

Subscribers at CNN get free video with their stories at http://www.cnn.com/video/ Chase and Cadillac are the sponsors. Fortunately the ads are appealing because there is no avoiding them. There are about 14 categories - the usual World, U.S., business, sports, politics, entertainment, best of TV. Once into Video you can search or pick from lists of Picks and Top Video. Requires WIndows Media Player 9.

BlinkxTV adds Premium Video

blinkx Partners With IFILM to Bring Premium Video Entertainment to blinkx.tv Users PR Newswire (June 14)

"Under the terms of the partnership, blinkx will be able to search rich media content available at IFILM (http://www.ifilm.com), a leading video-entertainment destination, offering content across a variety of channels including movies, short films, TV clips, video-game trailers, music videos, action sports as well as its celebrated Viral Videos collection."

Google Images

Google Increases Size of Image Database SEW Blog (June 9) - Up to 1.3 billion at least. Gary Prices suggests the number was selected to match Yahoo's. Who knows how many there really are?

Premium Google Video

Google readying Web-only video search by Stephanie Olsen, CNet.com (June 13) - Let's hope this isn't vaporware or hype for Google Video - " Google is expected to unveil a search engine for Web-only video this summer that will let people preview media clips from its Web site..."

"Longer term, Google is preparing a payment system for a premium video service that would let people pay to watch full video clips. Google is talking to several top-tier content providers, including Hollywood movie studios, to gain agreements for aggregating their video and selling premium or pay-per-view access."

Singingfish adds sources

AOL's Singingfish Expands Video Search Engine with New Content Partnerships Business Wire (June 9)

Singingfish, the audio video search engines from AOL "will begin featuring optimized video content feeds from more than 13 new partners including: AtomFilms, Big-Boys.com, CBSNews.com, CNN, Healthology, Inc., Hollywood.com, IFILM, Like Television, ManiaTV.com, MarketWatch from Dow Jones & Company, The One Network, ROO Media and TotalVid."

Singingfish handles well over 200 million video and audio searches each month.

CBC Podcasting

CBC to offer Podcasts Globe and Mail (June 3)

"On June 6, CBC Radio 3 will introduce its podcasting service, which will offer new, half-hour radio programs for listeners' iPods, MP3 players and computers. Similar in style and content to Radio 3's regular Saturday night programming, this podcast will have only Canadian music from new and emerging artists."

Subscribe to new shows at www.cbc.ca/podcasting

A9 and GoFish

GoFish Technologies Multimedia Search Results Now Available on A9.com - Users Can Now Search and Link to GoFish Multimedia Content Directly From A9.com - PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch [registration] (May 26)

"A9.com users can add GoFish to their set of content sources to search by selecting "over 100 more" from the drop-down menu titled "More Choices" on the A9.com homepage and choosing "GoFish Digital Media Search" from the list of options. These users can then receive search results from GoFish and link to a continuously growing index of over 30 million commercially available digital media downloads including music, movies, music videos, ring tones, mobile games, and PC games."

Bittorrent Closed

Feds shut down BitTorrent hub by John Borland, CNet (May 25)

"Federal agents shut down a popular Web site Wednesday that had distributed copyrighted music and movies, including versions of the latest "Star Wars" movie."

Elite Torrent was the hub that was closed for copyright infringement.

BitTorrent Search

BitTorrent creator to launch search engine - Web site would help users track down movie, music files, AP via MSN News (May 23)

BitTorrent, an online file-sharing program, has announced a new web search engine for finding sites that host sites for downloading movies, music and other data. Should be available later this week.

"The program, developed by Cohen in 2001, looks for torrent files — digital markers that it needs to assemble complete files from multiple bits of data obtained from other computer users."

Next for BitTorrent: Search by Kevin Poulsen, Wired News (May 23) - describes the web search will rank based on availability of the file as well as relevance.

Points out that BitTorrent has been associated with online piracy because people use it to get copyright movies. This new engine will attract the attention of publishers.

Online Video Search

Yahoo! fudges video search - By Faultline (May 11) - explains some the current workings of Yahoo video. "On Yahoo!, the snippets of video that are indexed are all very short and all of them so far appear to be indexed, based on what the video is called or how it is described." - and sees a future with much more where people can find genuine film.

Yahoo Music

I want my Yahoo music - Commentary: Cheap rental is the way to go by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch [subscription] (May 11)

Will the new subscription-based Yahoo Music for cheap downloads take off? Francisco doesn't know but she does say - "There's no doubt Yahoo's move is a serious development in digital music. The company has been successful at getting people to subscribe to its services. It has 8.9 million subscribers for its mail, dating and broadband access services."

Music Search Engine - Yahoo

Yahoo developing an audio search engine - by Stephanie Olsen, CNet (May 5)

Yahoo "plans to introduce the music search engine within the next couple of months, according to a source familiar with the service. The specialty engine will let people search on an artist's name, for example, and retrieve all the available songs from other music services, as well as album reviews and band information from Yahoo Music."

Yahoo Video Search

Yahoo! Search Goes Primetime with Comprehensive Video on the Web - "New Partnerships with Buena Vista Pictures, CBS News, Discovery Communications, MTV, Reuters, Scripps Networks, VH1 and More Make Yahoo! Video Search The First Place To Go For Online Video", Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch [requires registration] (May 5)

"Yahoo! Video Search provides consumers with a comprehensive source for video on the Web," said John Thrall, head of media search engineering, Yahoo! Search. "Our powerful media crawling, extraction, and ranking technology as well as our broad relationships with content partners enable Yahoo! Video Search to provide users with the leading online video search experience."

Video Hubs

Search engines, startup media sites dream of becoming video hubs - by Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review (Apr 26)

There may be a grassroots media movement taking place that will encourage everyman to create and share videos. Mentions OurMedia, for open source for personal media based somewhat on the Wikipedia model. Also Open Media Network "backed by Netscape veterans Mike Homer and Marc Andreessen".

Google has invited people to submit videos to them at Google Video. Yahoo and Singingfish are well advanced in their video offerings.

Some comments about this in the Search Engine Journal - Video Search, Media, and New Google Partners

Podcasting

From your lips to millions of ears via podcasting by Tessa Wegert, Globe and Mail (Apr 14)

A little of the background to podcasting -- "The concept of podcasting emerged in August of last year, when Adam Curry, a former MTV host turned entrepreneur, and David Winer, the inventor of RSS, launched a media aggregator called iPodder. Mr. Curry then started Daily Source Code, his podcast about Internet technology. Canadian Tod Maffin was among the first to follow suit."

"It's estimated that there are already more than 4,300 different podcasts around the world covering a variety of subjects and the number of listeners is also on the rise. "

There is potential for business too, and certainly for current broadcasters.

"In addition to the CBC, high-profile radio stations such as the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and Boston Public Radio (WGBH Boston) are already making some of their broadcasts available through podcasts. "

Search Podcasts

Podcasting is getting more attention. These are audio broadcasts distributed through RSS that can be played on an iPod or other digital audio player (including your computer). TVEyes, which has been indexing television and radio broadcasts, will be releasing PodScope as tool for searching podcasts.

TVEyes Announces Podscope® - The First Engine to Search Within a Podcast, Press Release (Apr 11)

This could very well be the next wave to take over the Internet, as blogging and RSS have been. More comments by Rita Vine in her entry - Search Engine for Podcasts

For background on podcasting see entry in Wikipedia.

Podcasting

Podcasting: A Made-to-Order Change for Listeners -- and Perhaps Stations, Too By Marc Fisher, Washington Post (April 10) - Podcasting is the next wave -- "A podcast is a radio show, created by anyone who owns a computer and a microphone, that can be downloaded onto listeners' computers or portable music players." More information about podcasting at www.ipodder.org.

Video Search

Search Engines Sharpen Focus on Video, by Paul Eng, ABC News (April 7)

"Google announced that it will begin archiving digital video clips from users as part of its Web search service. The company also announced it would work with Current.tv, a TV network being developed by former Vice President Al Gore which will air original videos created by today's young and digital-savvy Net-generation. And in January, the search giant released a test version of Google Video, an online search engine that peruses the closed-captioned text of broadcasted TV shows to find relevant clips to Web queries."

Yahoo Video has had a head start. It "categorizes online clips based on the text that surrounds it".

GoFish and IceRocket partners in multimedia search

GoFish and IceRocket Partner for Multimedia Search Search Engine Journal (Mar 16)

"GoFish and IceRocket search have partnered to deliver the largest single searchable universe of digital media downloads encompassing the categories of audio, video, mobile content, and games."

More about IceRocket in this interview with Blake Rhodes by Lara Stella in MetrixMedia (2004)

"IceRocket is banking on the link between search and relationships in the hopes that it'll feed the needs of the information starved twenty-somethings. "

IceRocket shows thumbshots of sites and links to Internet Archives in its Web search. Also searches weblogs, news, images (very good), multimedia (new), and phone pics. Can create RSS feeds from searches as well.

GoFish announced new browser plug-ins last month -- GoFish Technologies Tells Customers to 'GoFish This!'

GoFish claims, "GoFish has mapped the largest single searchable universe of digital media downloads encompassing the categories of audio, video, mobile content, and games. By developing proprietary search algorithms, hosting regular updates, and offering partners access via an open API, GoFish is delivering a turn-key solution and quantifiable benefits to search engines and portals working to address the demand for multimedia downloads."

Ask Jeeves Pictures

Gettin’ the Picture, AJ Style Ask Jeeves Weblog (Mar 3) AJ uses Picsearch for the Ask Jeeves Picture search but has tweaked the algorithms for better relevance. Weblog entry has some examples of before and after - impressive.

MSN Image Search Uses Picsearch

MSN is now partnering with Picsearch of Sweden for its Image search. Picsearch announces collaboration with MSN - Image search for the new MSN Search is powered by Picsearch AB. Press release (Feb 21) It claims "hundreds of millions of images".

At MSN Search the image search options are by size (large, medium, small) and color or black and white.

But at Picsearch itself, you can use Advanced search for 6 choices in size, select on color vs black and white, and on images vs animations.

Ask Jeeves and Lycos also use Picsearch.

Yahoo Image Search

Yahoo Beefs Up Image Search Index to 1.5 Billion Images, Adds Shortcuts SearchEngineJournal (Feb 23)

Yahoo Image database is now 1.5 billion (that's larger than Google's). It has also added some trigger words that work in the Web search to show images as well as colour or format.

For example --

Web search for peace tower ottawa photos. Trigger words are photo, picture, image, and the plural forms.

Or -- black and white images peace tower ottawa

Also see Yahoo Increases Size of Image Database, New Features Added Search Engine Watch Blog. (Feb 23)

Annodex Video Search

Firefox plugin delivers HTML-style audio and video browsing by Renai Lemay, ZDNet Australia (Feb 11) -- "Australia's CSIRO research organisation has developed a Firefox plugin named Annodex that allows browsing through time-continuous media such as audio and video in the same way that HTML allows browsing through text."

More about this video surfing tool at http://www.annodex.net/.

CTO of Blinkx Talks

Video search with Blinkx Network World Fusion (Jan 31) -- Suranga Chandratillake, co-founder and CTO of Blinkx talks about Blinkx's video search technology. Blinkx TV accesses video and audio and makes it searchable by picking up text on the page around the clip, using any closed captioning, and using audio recognition to do on-the-fly transcripts.

Video/TV Search Hot

Video search is hot judging from the number of review and assessment articles turning up.

Will Video Search Pay Off? By Susan Kuchinskas, Internet News ( January 26, 2005)

"There are three models for indexing and discovering relevant video content: metadata, which Yahoo uses; text generated during the closed captioning process, which Yahoo and Google use; and transcription-on-the-fly, carried out by Blinkx with technology from enterprise search player Autonomy."

Comments on Google Video, Blinkx TV , Yahoo with TV Eyes.

Related: Blinkx 2.0 Adds Smart Folders CLickz (Nov 15, 2004)

Yahoo Entertainment

Yahoo heads for Hollywood Stephanie Olsen, CNet (Jan 25) - new group at Yahoo called Yahoo Media Group -- "will encompass Yahoo properties including games, news, sports, finance, movies, and music services Launch and Musicmatch".

Google TV Search

Google has a new search engine in beta for searching recent TV shows -- Google Video. Help page says that content is limited tending to a few TV channels in San Francisco, PBS, FOX and CSPAN. Google is indexing the closed captioning text. It's easy to find out when stars of West Wing turned up on Ellen DeGeneres, but you can't play the video.

Also see Yahoo!, Google Thrust Video Search Into Spotlight Clickz (Jan 25) Covers Google, Yahoo, and AOL with Singingfish.

At Home Media Center - Apple v Google

Apple v. Google: A Matter of Timing By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, Baseline in PC Magazine (Jan 13)

Starts with Apple's iPod Photo, a "media center" machine, and moves to iLife, "iLife, Apple's pretty "seamless" software suite that allows the average person to manage huge digital playlists of music, create and sculpt large libraries of digital photos, develop and edit digital movies, and even build professional sounding songs from scratch." He predicts that the Mac mini will develop into a "digital content manager". The clash with Google will be as both try "to act as the spigot and control point of choice of nontechnical humans everywhere for handling the flood of digits coming onto home screens. Google will support its thrust through profits on advertising. Apple will support its thrust through profits on hardware. But they will meet in the middle."

"In any case, the two companies will be competing to be in control of the next generation of digital media life, when entertainment and information from in-home and remote hard drives, as well as broadcast and cable signals, are blended onto the same screen."

Better Image Searching

Search Looks at the Big Picture by John Gartner, Wired (Jan 6)

"A group of European researchers is developing technology that could vastly improve image searching by identifying the components of an image. The group, which includes the Xerox Research Centre Europe and universities in France, England, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland, has developed software that can recognize everyday objects in digital images, according to Christopher Dance, a senior research scientist at Xerox."

Video and Photos

Newest search engines index video by Leslie Walker, Washington Post via Delaware Online (Dec 28) Reports on new services from Yahoo and Blinkx for video-search engines.

Also mentions a photo-sharing Web service called HeyPix - for putting photos on blogs and sharing those through RSS syndication. The free service allows 50 photos.

Singingfish for audio / video search

Singingfish Launches New Search Destination ResearchBuzz (Dec 6) - review of the revised Singingfish.com, an audio / video search engine.

SingingFish helps you search by format and category, and limit by duration. Also has a help page on installing media players.

GoFish for Songs

Name that tune -- then find it with GoFish By Michael Bazeley, Mercury News (Nov 27) Announces GoFish a kind of music comparison shopping search engine -- "GoFish, started by the founder of the now-defunct Musiclocker service, allows people to simultaneously search for songs from Napster, Buy.com, iTunes and a host of other online music merchants. The site also looks for audiobooks, video, ring tones and games."

Yahoo Images

Yahoo Image Search Breaks a Billion Research Buzz (Oct 25) - Yahoo has a billion images now , and Google may still be at 880 million.

Yahoo Image Search has an Advanced Search with filters for size (large, medium, small, wallpaper), image type (photos or graphics), and color along with keywords (any, all, phrase) and domain. People with mobile phones can search it too. (Why would they need to?) The Altavista Image Search, which Yahoo owns, has a much better set of filters for size (many sizes), color (B&W vs color), source, and type.

MSN Entertainment

Microsoft increases entertainment focus AP via Globe Technology (OCt 13) Get ready for Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Yahoo and Musicmatch

Yahoo! and Musicmatch: A Hot Duet "The $160 million deal signals that Semel & Co. will mount the biggest challenge yet to Apple's dominance of online music", Ben Elgin. BusinessWeek (Sept 15) "Musicmatch should help Yahoo, with over 200,000 subscribers to its ad-free radio service and nearly 10 million users of its desktop software for creating playlists and burning CDs. "

Art on the Web

Looking for Good Art: Web Resources and Image Databases, Part 1
by David Mattison. Searcher Sept 2004

Another comprehensive and useful examination of resources by David Mattison.

"I will chiefly deal with digitized, original historical Western (European and North American) art images of any nonphotographic medium prior to the 20th century found in cultural institutions or on private sites. I've ignored commercial art and illustration, as well as architectural images. My intent was to create a kind of virtual "grand tour" of Western art, mainly from English-language sources, and to survey and sample the largest and best historical art from institutions and private sites in North America and Europe. I consulted many art history subject guides and gateways, relying chiefly on those compiled by art historians or art librarians. Due to space limitations, I've had to leave out many other kinds of resources, some of which I've summarized in the sidebar at left, "It's All Art: Other Search Spots for Online Art Images." "

Save Internet Radio

Jason Parker at AnchorDesk has Three easy apps for recording Internet radio.

SimSearch and Idée

Visual Search: Beyond Keywords "Idée’s Visual Search technology now integrated on Masterfile" Press Release (Aug 25)

Masterfile, a major stock photo agency, has licensed the Espion Site Search technology from Idée of Toronto. The new SimSearch at the Masterfile website provides for searching and buying rights-managed and royalty-free images. Search on a keyword, find more like this, collect items in a "light box" for viewing later, review search history, and control search parameters. The beauty of the search is in the visual matching it can do to find more images like the one you pick. The likenesses may be thematic - on the same subject, or visual - colour and tonality. The Globe and Mail called SimSearch "one of the most compelling visual search tools in the stock photo industry today".

Idée's Visual search integrated on Masterfile Globe and Mail (Aug 26)

Internet2 for videoconferencing

Online education is about to get another burst of power. Internet2: 2004 and beyond Marguerite Reardon CNET (Aug 24) Violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman uses high-definition videoconferencing technology over the Internet2 network to give individual instruction to students with high quality sound.

Guide to Online Music

CNN has a special feature about the Online Music Revolution. (Aug 19) "The rise of online music is changing the way music is produced, sold and experienced, both by fans and those who make their living in the music business." Includes a Gallery of where to find digital music.

Format confusion -- Your music, differing formats -- describes the variety of formats and related digital rights management arrangements. It's not easy to keep it all straight.

Music on your hard drive made easy: Simple steps to digitize your music collection. - how to do it, what to use - if you have time.

Musicplasma

Musicplasma. Enter a musician's name (preferably contemporary) to get a visual map of related artists. Artists show as orbs, the size of the circle indicating relative importance. There are arcing lines. Click on another artist / performer to get a new map. For example, on a search for George Gershwin, Bette Midler is one big orb. Clicking on her orb changes the relationships. Items available through Amazon for the artist are listed on the left. Can play some cuts. Frankly, it's all very confusing, but then the display did not fit well in my IE 6 browser. Doesn't look ready for primetime.

A Visual Search Engine for Music By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (July 12). He liked it.

BBC Archives - Motion

Historical BBC archives go online BBC News (June 24)

BBC Motion Gallery will provide direct access over the Internet to more 300,000 hours of BBC footage over 70 years and also imagery from CBS News archive. There are a few sample reels as demos. Other material requires registration and fees.

Tara Calishain gives a first hand account of registering and viewing clips. BBC Launches their Motion Gallery (June 28).

Streamed content

Searching for Audio and Video Resources by Gary Price. Presented to Computers in Library 2004 - outlines reasons for wanting to use streamed content. Has several tools for searching the "spoken word", and lists many sources of "Live and Archived Streaming Content". List has CPAC in Canada for government and election news. For Canada, add to this list CTV.ca for news video clips and CBC.ca for news clips, live radio, and the substantial archives for radio and television.

Visual Collections

New Digital Image Collection Portal Debuts Newsbreaks (June 1) - Visual Collections of art, history and culture. Over 300,000 images from 30 collections. Some collections require subscription.

Finding Audio

Search engines try to find their sound by Stephanie Olsen. CNet (May 26) National Public Radio will be transcribing sound files to text files as they are broadcast in order to be picked up by the search engines. Because of this links to more audio files - or at least to pages with audio files - will come up. But there are also specialty search engines that do search multimedia format -- Singingfish, StreamSage, Hewlett-Packard, Virage, Nexidia.

Image Search with Pixlogic

Images Get Their Own Search Engine Penelope Patsuris Forbes (May 4) Pixlogic is a new startup from California that can do visual search or have "image understanding". No demo available.

British Library Sound Recordings

British Library puts sound archive online Donald MacLeod Guardian (April 16, 2004 ) British Library is making 1000's of sound recordings available to higher education institutions in the UK. There are a few samples at The British Library Sound Archive.

Audible for Audio Books

Beyond Music: Downloading Audio Books "The Growing Audible Revolution - a conversation with Audible.com founder and CEO Don Katz " By Dana Greenlee, Co-Host WebTalkGuys Radio -- Need something to listen to on the road? Audible will have it - "40,000 hours of audio books, broadcasts, magazines and newspapers ready to download". Makes one want to get an MP3 portable player. Check Audible.com.

Finding Sounds

Searching For Sounds by Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Feb 5) - reviews the specialty search engine Find Sounds. These are small sounds like a mosquito, chipmunk, or a church bell. There is also a "sounds like" search.

Monitor TV News

ShadowTV Delivers Searchable Video News to Web Consumers by Barbara Quint. Newsbreaks (Nov 24) -- ShadowTV, "the online monitoring service that offers full-text searchable access and delivery of television news", is now offering a consumer monitoring service.

"Real-time access through the new service is restricted to CNBC and NBC News programs, but users will also have access to a 2-week archive of all CNBC programs plus NBC’s “Today,” “NBC Nightly News,” and “Meet the Press.” Within 7 minutes of a live television broadcast, subscribers can search for words or phrases or read e-mail alerts. Once found, subscribers link to video streams hosted on ShadowTV’s equipment. The service will cost $12.95 a month for the NBC shows, $19.95 for CNBC, and $29.95 for both."

Saving MP3.com files

Archive.org to Vivendi: we'll host MP3.com's files By Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco (Nov 21) The Register -- CNet has bought the domain mp3.com but without the music. Vivendi intends to close the collection. Brewster Kahle has offered to add the files to Archive.org.

AOL to buy Singingfish

AOL reels in search engine Singingfish By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY (Nov 18) - cute headline but the news can't be good. America Online announced that it intends to buy Singingfish.com, the Seattle-based company that is the premier search engine for multimedia with 45 million music and video files.

"By buying Singingfish, AOL becomes the leader in cutting-edge audio and video searches. It might next introduce a service that enables paid downloading of video files, such as movies or music videos." ... "AOL, a unit of media and entertainment giant Time Warner, says it will keep using the Singingfish brand name for audio and video searches, and continue to license Singingfish's services to Microsoft and RealNetworks."

SingingFish for multimedia search

The Missing Keyword Of Search Engine Marketing: Multimedia by Kate Kaye. MediaPost (Nov 17) Delivery and use of multimedia has been climbing. 21% of Amercan Internet users over the age of 12 accessed multimedia in July 2003. Singingfish is the foremost search engine for multimedia. It has indexed over 9 million streams. It now has a paid inclusion program -- "Advertisers can set live dates and kill dates for specific audio and video streams and are also provided with a landing page that can be tied to particular content. "

For searching Flash files, however, Alltheweb is considered the best.

Video at the Portals

Yahoo to kill paid video service By Jim Hu and Stefanie Olsen CNET News.com (Oct 30) Yahoo Platinum, the premium source of streamed video clips, will be merged into tje Yahoo Plus bundle of premium service. But there may also be more free video for non-subscribers. MSN and AOL are also changing their video offerings.

Online Video: Feedroom.com

Online Video: Feedroom.com is an Internet broadcaster with partnerships with Reuters, NBC, Tribune Company, Playboy, Miramax Films, Business Week, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, General Motors, AT&T, and Bausch & Lom. It offers news and entertainment and "delivers more than 30 million streams of video per month to millions of viewers worldwide".

" The FeedRoom operates the most extensive local video news network in the United States. The FeedRoom sites offer local television stations the opportunity to take advantage of both the surge in popularity of streaming news video and proven demand for more and better local new coverage online. "

The intended customer is the corporate web site, but individuals may view several channels at the www.feedroom.com site. FeedRoom also offers free video alerts for news, business, technology, and fashion. Subscribe at http://subscription.videolink.feedroom.com/FeedRoom/FeedRoom_prefctr.asp.

Thanks to Rod for tip.