Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron is a pioneering video blogger who has always been on the cutting technical edge of vlogging, including advanced syndication strategies and the distribution of file formats for multiple platforms.
Andrew has tackled one of the biggest challenges facing video bloggers — how to make video content searchable. To make this work, he’s teamed with Boston-based Podzinger.
Podzinger is one of the leading developers of voice-to-text technology. The company "listens" to podcasts and audio tracks of video blogs and provides indexes of transcriptions and specific video segments.
Each day, Podzinger creates a transcription and renders it as a Flash video file of the Rocketboom show. When you visit the search page of Rocketboom, you can enter search words and you will find an index of stories with time codes specifying when the search term is referenced. Click on that entry and a Flash player will play that segment. (It’s interesting to note that Rocketboom does not publish its video in Flash – but downloadable files, which cannot be "tagged" in this manner. So, Podzinger provides both the indexing and publishing of the video in Flash.)
Andrew also discusses the importance of creating subtitles for Rocketboom segments in various languages. To make this happen, he is going to leverage the power of the show’s global audience to participate in a "translation Wiki". You can find this cool project at Cueteboom, Rocketboom with Spanish subtitles.
Not only do these transcriptions and captions serve a growing audience at Rocketboom, they provides a mother load of metadata to increase the searchability from search engines crawling for text.
Break.com Offers $400 for Community-Generated Videos
It was interesting to see that one video sharing site, Break.com, is willing to help young video makers earn cash — it pays some $400 for video clips and $2,000 for animated shorts. Story is published by Reuters. On its home page, Break.com states it has handed out $300,000 for user-generated content. It highlights a payout with a stack of hundred dollar bills and big dollar signs on the top of the home page.
Not sure how this will play out, but Current TV is paying independent content producers. For some video makers, it will be a more viable way to monetize their work than to share advertising revenue on a CPM model.
