Video Search vs Tagging

From RWW:

Realistic video search seems to be a long ways off from where I sit, but I’m not sure I buy how disruptive tagging actually is. Yep, I’ve read Shirky, I use del.icio.us regularly and I appreciate and argue for tagging in the applications and services I use. The problem is I actually loathe it. Most of the time I can’t be bothered to tag anything. I’m lazy. I don’t tag diddly squat in Lightroom, and find tagging in del.icio.us a chore (I appreciate it later on when I’m looking something up, but man does it suck during creation). Granted, I’m a weirdo, but I don’t think I’m alone in being a belligerent and lazy tagger.

In my view it’s going to be up to client software to automatically tag items for me. Working for a screen capture / screen recording company I often think of this in terms of the the recording client tracking what application I’m using or what URL I’m visiting and attaching metadata to my output. This “contextual use” data would be stored alongside things that normally come to mind when you think of automatically generated metadata — time, operating system, geographic location, etc.

When you combine baseline metadata with contextual information I think you end up meeting the “good enough” threshold Bernard establishes (sprinkle in some good old demographic data and things get even more interesting). And this approach is not confined to screen recording clients and the media they spit out. All content creation clients need to get “smart” and provide this extra layer of data, or at least expose it as a set of automatic default tags which can easily be cleared away or supplemented.

Perhaps I’m just not seeing the forest for the trees — the open, public social media repositories on the web and massive scale of users may mean that none of us actually have to tag all that much. Or maybe speech recognition is all that’s needed to really need to drive down the tagging pain threshold. If you’ve got insight, I’m listening.