Thursday, June 5, 2008

Video Views

If you love your online video, you will set it free

By Denise de Murcie

If your company plans to produce online video for marketing purposes you will need to decide the extent to which you will trust your audience with your content. Will you require that your visitors watch your videos on your website or will you enable them to take your clips out of your controlled environment?

The book “Everything is Miscellaneous” by David Weinberger of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University helps us to understand what is happening to information — and why it is best to set it free.

As Weinberger explains, the Internet has changed the way we organize information. In the paper world, when you publish a product catalog, for example, an item is listed in one place under the category deemed most appropriate. On the Internet, however, the physical constraints that limited information to one place do not exist. And whereas previously only content publishers or experts classified information, now anybody can. 

Like worker bees, Internet users cross-pollinate content — discuss it, rate it, tag it, pull it apart, mash it up, join it up with other information, and leave it scattered everywhere on the Internet, which allows them to deposit information and its metadata (information about information). Content publishers today merely start the process of organizing information and consumers do the rest. 

The result is a huge pile of miscellaneous information spread out all over cyberspace, which is not surprising when you consider, as Weinberger puts it, “everything belongs in more than one place, at least a little bit.” Previously, we filtered information on the way in; under the new, miscellaneous order, Weinberger observes, it is filtered on the way out. And that turns out to be a better organizational system. “Content experts cannot possibly come up with a single way of organizing and classifying that works for everybody and every purpose. How we organize and classify things, how we think about things, depends on what we’re trying to do. Users are able to use the criteria and find the information that matters to them at that moment.”

One year since “Everything is Miscellaneous” was published, it is clear the author’s theory also applies to video content. From the start, YouTube wrapped online video in sharing tools, surfacing the link and embed codes, creating the trend and expectation that online video viewers would also be its distributors. At the same time, YouTube made video tagging and commenting popular. Thanks to such consumer-generated metadata, it is possible to find a video under more search terms than the publisher’s own tags and descriptions make possible.

Even when not doing so intentionally, video viewers leave metadata behind, such as behavior data collected through tracking that is used to create “Most Popular” or “Most Discussed” playlists. And so the reordering of video content goes on manually and dynamically.

Today you can upload video to numerous portals at once (TubeMogul), auto-generate transcripts (EveryZing), add text and video comments to the video’s timeline (Viddler) and remix a video using metadata (Gotuit), to name a few new activities that make video miscellaneous. You can also use new tracking tools to see where your video ends up and how people engage with it (Visible Measures).

As scary as it may be for a company to do, freeing information, as Weinberger notes, “is often a generosity that pays itself back not only in introducing your product to new users but by making it a part of their daily lives.” It also appears to be the only way to find out where your video belongs and what it’s worth to you and your customers.

 

Denise de Murcie is a media consultant, Internet entrepreneur and video producer in Boston. She can be reached at denise@high5video.com.