Our discussion on Wikipedia last night reminded me of this incredible video, created by the folks at Free Art & Technology -- a collective of artists, programmers, musicians, and more, dedicated to advancing open source technology and free expression.
The video depicts editors of the Wikipedia entry for Barack Obama as constellations that light up as they make changes -- and drift closer to the center the more frequently they do so. The center itself is a tiny orb of light that seems constantly activated, electrified, pulled this way and that: like a visualization of the "narrative center of gravity" (h/t Daniel Dennett) of the President's online identity in the run-up to the election.
Given the tumult and constant tug-of-war that defines content on Wikipedia, does David Shay's video solution seem practical? Sustainable? Can it -- to use his own formulation -- get people's attention, or will it merely be a venue for visual vandalism? As Prof. K said, 24 hours of video is currently being uploaded to YouTube every minute. How many more full-time employees and editorial police will Wikipedia require to troll through what will likely be an even more intensive flow of data, one that arrives in a non-linear trajectory including not just additional clips but the remixing and removal of content?
Shay's emphasis on the value of meta-data made me wonder whether this enterprise -- though daunting and potentially quite chaotic -- might ultimately help overcome one of the great frustrations of online marketing, namely the inability of computers to effectively "read" images (and by extension, video). Could Kaltura devise a way to harness this flow of data, along with real-time observations on the way people use it, to develop better intelligence -- in search and beyond -- vis a vis the meaning and uses of video content online? If video is in fact making text obsolete, and our media ecosystem continues to rapidly evolve toward a video-saturated, "everyone participates" kind of environment, the ability to win a viewer's attention may be contingent on finding ways more sophisticated than tags (which require a critical mass of user involvement to have much meaning anyway) to serve the right content to the right user at the right time.
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