One Million Minutes of Unfindable Video
July 23, 2015
I read “AP Makes One Million Minutes of Historical Footage Available on YouTube.” This struck me as an anomaly. The AP is an outfit which, as I recall, rattled sabers and showed knives to people who quote from their articles. Also, the AP is in a revenue hunt; that is, the good old days of newspapers are history. The company is, like many outfits sired in the stable of dead tree journalism, adapting. Need a real time news feed with search, the AP offers this via a tie up with a former Bell Labs’ person. I will wager $1.00 in pennies that you cannot name the vendor? Send your answers to benkent2020 at yahoo dot com.
The AP write up reports that lots of video has been digitized and placed on YouTube. There are links to videos which AP finds interesting. The word “find” brings up an interesting question: “How does one locate a video?” and “How does one locate a series of related videos?” and “How does one find a video with a specific segment of text in it?” and “How does one find a video with a specific image in it?”
The answer, gentle reader, is that one cannot. I know that AP is excited about this collection. I assume that Google is pleased that the collection is not on Facebook.
As a user, the approach to locating a video is somewhat unsatisfying. Prepare your patient self to guess keywords, click, and watch in serial fashion one million videos. Well, maybe a couple.
Without search, this collection, like Google’s Life Magazine images, is useful to folks with time on their hands and even more time on their hands. A dump is not useful to me. To you, gentle reader, and to the executives at AP, I am picking nits. The problem is that these nits are the size of the synthetic creatures in Jurassic World. Big nits. My hunch is that the ad revenue from these videos will be the size of regular, run of the mill nits. I hope I am wrong. Don’t forget to submit the name of the AP’s real time, online news intelligence service. I will accept entries for 24 hours.
Stephen E Arnold, July 23, 2015
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