Nice story in the NYT about the importance of video search today. The key point is made just where it should be -- at the top of the article:
THE World Wide Web is awash in digital video, but too often we can’t find the videos we want or browse for what we might like. That’s a loss, because if we could search for Internet videos, they might become the content of a global television station, just as the Web’s hypertext, once it was organized and tamed by search, became the stuff of a universal library.
What we need, says Suranga Chandratillake, a co-founder of Blinkx, a start-up in San Francisco, is a remote control for the Web’s videos, a kind of electronic TV Guide. He’s got just the thing.
I'm not totally sold on the solution being offered here (I kept wondering where I had seen the company name before -- then realized I'd installed it some time back to test desktop search, back when they did that product), but if you squint really hard you can see the air start coming out of the YouTube balloon. If someone comes up with video search that really works, in the same way that text search generally works today, then the allure of putting video in a central spot (which is sort of expensive for the hosting company, btw) becomes moot.
I wrote the other day about how hard it is to believe that some people still live in a world where they don't think what they said yesterday is readily accessible to the world. Mostly, these are people in power or those who desire to be in power. The good is, we will all have the tools to check. The bad is, we are equally visible for everything we've said or filmed or posted to photo sharing sites and the like. A glass house, indeed.