Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

We can already tag videos, of course. But how about being able to tag the good parts?

YourView lets users mark segments on a video using a set of icons, and also indicate the "intensity" of each. In their example, a user could tag all the serves in a tennis match, and then watch all the high-intensity ones, or could watch all the non-boring parts of a cricket match, reducing a 44 hour match to 4 seconds and the credits. More to YourView's point, the broadcaster of the video could mark it up with icons.

This isn't exactly tagging because the user only has access to a pre-determined set of icons (and it's not clear from the site who determines the set). It's also not clear whether user-based markings are public and social; I'm assuming not. So, you don't get the social effects of tagging, e.g., find the segments of a video the most people have marked "great shot" or find all segments of all videos anyone has marked "whoops."

It requires the use of the YourView viewer. Enable any user to do this outside of the YourView viewer, and you'd really have something. (I'm not saying it'd be easy.)

MotionBox.com has a related function that lets you select any portion of a video and tag it—real tags—with any words you want. It seems that only the person who posts the video can tag selections, though. And you have to view the video on the MotionBox site.