the Onda

While the embedded video clip has become as common as the animated GIF, littering webpages with colorful bits of video that help to make a point or add color to a blog post. Unlike text however, most rich media suffers from a the linear consumption problem; that is, if what you are doing is scanning quickly, the various bits of rich media become speedbumps in the path of grazing the underlying content. In some cases, the video is really worth stopping for, but in most you end up feeling like you want those 3 minutes back in your life.

For a while now I've thought that this proliferation of linearly consumed media would mean that rich recommendation systems were going to be making a comeback (hello collaborative filters!), but in order to do so, they'll actually have to work (a dubious proposition), and more importantly, we'll need to find a sub-URL way to indicate ratings in a open way that can be used as input by the various recommendation algorithms.

Another approach which I've recently seen used to great success is the mixing of the rich media with solid scannable navigation aids and pointers into timecodes in the video, so that the interested user can quickly skip around. Much to my surprise, it was the New York Times that first showed me the power of this approach with their "live transcript" of the Obama speech on race. Having a transcript that scrolls along in sync to the video is such a simple thing to do, but makes such a huge difference in lowering the impedance mismatch between the text-heavy web and various rich media formats.

Another great example is being built by a startup called Omnisio which allows for the annotation of presentations (a frequent subject of the embedded video clips I come across), along with the slides the presenter is using. They've currently got a bunch of annoying user-commenting features but once you shut those off (from the user control panel), the resulting experience makes watching presentations 100x more enjoyable and efficient.

Just another lesson in how sometimes the simple solution, well executed, can yield great results.

Post a comment