Presentation of Flickr story on News.com

While browsing the Flickr story on News.com, I noted a very interesting approach to presentation.

This story is a video. But this video is presented in segmented form with specific annotations to specif parts of the story. Clearly in its current form, the segmentation of video has been done manually and the annotations are by the authors. Independent how these segmentations are done, the fact is that the presentation of the video in this form is a big help to the reader (browser) id deciding which part of the interview video she wants to view. This is the form of the video viewing that is a lot more desirable than putting the complete video. It has several advantages: based on annotations, search techniques could take the interested user to the relevant section of the video; each section of the video could be considered an indepndent (but related) ‘story’ making it wasily reusable; and since each section (segment) has now beome independent, users can them reorder according to their priority.

This approach is not new — has been around for long time — but its use in a popular site is refreshing to see. Also, one can see the advantages mentioned above in action immediately by viewing the right panel on the same page. While showing related stories, each segment of the story is shown as an independent story in the related link-tree.

While this is being doen manually today, some of this could be done automatically or using folksonomy. Multimedia and computer vision researchers have been working on making video segmentation automatic for some time and are making progress. Such presentations of video will motivate these researchers to become more creative.