Media for the eyes and ears
Posted by Sandra Cosser on 16 Oct 2007 at 02:21 pm | Tagged as: Hot off the Press
Most text media, in fact most media in general, which is uploaded to the web, is tagged with metadata. This is so that it can be found easily on traditional search engines. But more and more innovative and creative companies are looking at new ways of uploading and searching for data in order to more fully involve all the senses. They want to make the way in which we search on the net seem more like the way in which we sort through and assimilate the world around us.
When it comes to video searches, blinkx, are considered the pioneers in the field. They have developed their own system that uses a unique combination of elements, including speech and soundtrack, images and embedded information to find and qualify online video. Blinkx has an index of over 14 million hours of video and more than 200 media partnerships making it a global giant in the video search engine arena. If anyone wants to put anything on online television, they go to blinkx. They never cease innovating and creating as they are committed to providing the most advanced capabilities and delivering the highest value to audiences and partners alike.
Retrievr is a tool that can be used to search through photographs in the site flickr, by what they look like and not by a description of what they are. One of its limits, however, is that it doesn’t do object/text/face recognition at all. Instead what it does is match the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colour. There is also no way of specifying ratio so you have to scale the image carefully. It is recommended that the less detail you provide the more helpful it might prove to be. Retrievr has been described as more of an exploration tool than a search tool.
People are always evolving and changing and our needs are constantly changing along with us, usually our needs get greater and not less as we grow. Our needs for smarter technology that better understands us and works better for us is an example of a need that will never be satiated. The more technology develops to meet that need, the more that need will grow exponentially. We are irreversibly linked to technology and are dependent on it like we are dependent on air, food and water. So as hard as computer developers work to design new tools and programmes to provide brilliant search engines with ease of use and vast libraries to tap into, the more we will demand of them. That is the nature of humans.
