Categories are like tags, special links that group together similar things. When applied to annotation layers, (annotation layers describe a particular period of time in a Metavid stream with a start and endpoint), categories create collections of video.
One quality nearly every category shares is incompleteness — because there is so much content (over 3000 hours) and only a few of us tagging content, many categories are missing important content. As you watch speeches on Metavid, spending the extra 5 seconds to categorize them will make them easier to find in the future. If there’s a category you find interesting or appealing, feel free to expand it yourself. If you find a speech and there’s isn’t a category that makes sense for it — start a new one!
Check out this tutorial for more information about tagging clips. You can find a list of current media categories here.
I am inviting people to check out the add media wizard and Firefogg on test.wikipedia.org.To help test go to you user preferences on that server and enable the add media wizard gadget. You can add general feedback here
The Add Media Wizard adds a little “add media” button to every edit page letting you open up media search system to inject images and movie clips into your page. Presently the media search system searches commons, archive.org and metavid.org. (note archive.org inserts are not yet working because of a redirect bug we should have that fixed soon).
firefog logo
Firefogg is the really cool extension that everyone using open video on the web should know about! It packages ffmpeg2theora transcoder letting web sites trigger clients uploads of videos from whatever local format they have. Once you have enabled the add media wizard the site upload form gets a little use Firefogg button. Which you can use to enable the transcoder.
You may also want to see Brianna’s blog post made early this year about these media features. Stay tuned for wider gadget deployment … if your can’t wait you can always add
to your User:UserName/monobook.js page. (this will enable firefogg uploads… but we have not yet enabled copy by url uploads on the other sites so you can’t import resources from archive sites yet)
Google has started accepting applications for Summer of Code 2009. We are encouraging folks to check out the Wikimedia and Xiph/Annodex organizations. This year, in addition to participating under those organizations, I am helping out in organizing the Xiph/Annodex summer of code participation. We are trying to get the word out to get as many high quality applicants as possible. If you walk in technical, academic and open media circles please help circulate our call for submissions:
As sometimes happens in responding to a comment I ended up witting a blog post The commenter hits on a common theme around ogg / open video.
As a producer of video for the web rather then a programmer I can only say: Ogg for me has no value other then its open. That is nice and great in itself but with no professional back-end infrastructure to produce high quality webvideos without thinking about it [snip] nobody is going backward just for openness.
I agree. The present state of open video tools for professional production leave much to be desired. But the present feeling of bending backwards to use open video is about to end. We are on the forefront of rapidly shifting ecosystem and a shift of what it means to be a professional video producer.
Along with a few other exciting features; Open Congress is now syndicating Metavid video! This is on the heels of Govtrack’s recent addition of Metavid feeds as well. Open Congress integration includes full support for Bills and People pages along with YouTube syndication. You can see the full scope at open congress:
Videos from Metavid, the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, and the YouTube hubs for the House and Senate. Now, for every Senator, Representative, and major bill in Congress, OpenCongress shows you embedded video footage of relevant floor speeches, official announcements, and more. It’s video, it’s awesome.
An example bill page (that has had a lot of tagging activity) is the economic stimulus bill.
The US House, having just passed the stimulus package after hours of contentious debates and procedural motions, moved on to more serious business: congratulating the winners of the Super Bowl. Here’s a short clip of somebody off-camera airing their opinion. This somehow didn’t make it into the official record. The gem is @01:26.
At present, the #1 most discussed political clip on YouTube is a very short 16 second clip of Chuck Schumer claiming Americans don’t care about pork barrel spending.
The neat thing about Metavid is that because we archive the full day of proceedings, we can take that same 16 second clip and expand coverage from either side and provide context to an otherwise self-encapsulated sound byte. Here we can see Chuck’s quote as part of a larger rhetorical flourish; he calls for the removal of the pork spending and highlights what he sees are the important elements of the bill. Here is the the clip on Metavid:
The ability to dig deeper and investigate a given argument that is being presented is fundamental to understanding what is really taking place. This is why a citation framework for web video is so important for healthy deliberation. This way, the context (and contextualization) of a given source document can be investigated. Tools like Metavid open up this citation process for continued dialog in contrast to allowing the clip fragment to act as the final word.
We have two user guides available on the wiki. [Help:Usage_Quickstart] covers basic usage of the site — how to search and use the stream interface. [Help:Participation_Quickstart] is a good introduction to bill and category tagging.
As I’ve passed these guides around to some colleagues looking for feedback (yours is appreciated as well, naturally), I’ve been asked a few times, “Why is ‘peanut butter’ used in so many of your examples?” It’s actually a long answer which contains a key bit of Metavid’s history/mythology. I’ll explain after the fold. (more…)
Although it’s a bit late coming, I’m happy (and somewhat relieved :P) to announce that we’ve finally brought the all 2009 footage of the new 111th congress online, from Jan 6 to the present. Now that our capture system is fully functional (see earlier post), we plan on having new proceedings in the Metavid system within 24 hrs. Anyway, we encourage you to dig through the last few weeks of footage. Some highlights include:
I’m happy to announce some improvements we’ve made in our capture architecture. We’ve spent the last couple months implementing our new capture and transcode system. We have cut out some unnecessary complexity and updated or replaced many of our core components. For instance, we’ve switched our OCR over to Google’s Tesseract and are getting a considerably higher hit rate reading names off the scree. This makes it easier for you to find speeches by a particular person. (more…)
We use categories for a few different kinds of content. Some occur every day, like One Minute Speeches in the House. Others only occur once a year, like San Jacinto Day or Earth Day. Some will be limited to a particular debate, like Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, and others will be relevant to any topic such as Great Poster. There are small categories like Global Warming Skepticism and huge categories like Opening Prayer; serious ones, like Remembrances and light-hearted ones like Quiet Please.
… if your can’t wait you can always add
Google has started 