Granular Addressing in Google Video

I first heard about the term “Granular Addressing” from Doug Engelbart. Granular addressing is the ability to address a small fragment of a document. Here is a hypothetical situation.
I am reading an article on venture funding of search startups. I would like to share a few sentences that mention the funding activity to one of my friends. I have a few choices.

  1. Copy and paste the fragment of text along with a link to the original article and email it (this is what I do most of the time).
  2. Get one of those page annotation services, highlight the portion to draw his attention, add a comment on why I think this fact is important and send an annotation link.
  3. Mark the fragment, book mark it using del.icio.us (del.icio.us automatically copies the marked portion to the description of the bookmark) and add it as a shared bookmark.

If Doug’s concepts are implemented, granular addressing may become a feature of the web. See the activity related to HyperScope on the current effort.

The cutting and pasting stuff works good in most cases when the document is text. What do you do when the document is an audio or video file?

Google seems to have a solution for the video case. According to this blog entry, you can mark a portion of a video, optionally specify a fragment duration and share the link.

3 thoughts on “Granular Addressing in Google Video

  1. Dorai,

    Web-Marker for Firefox enables you to granularly address text content web pages. It lets you do this by dynamically encoding information about user selected text in the fragment identifier.

    A short gist about the extension

    Web-Marker lets you
    * Mark (highlight) portions of web pages
    * Get a link to these marked pages
    – Share the link with others
    – Bookmark it for later use
    * Copy the marked-text to the clipboard

    Web-Marker is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2679. It would be great if you could try it out and let us your thoughts. More on Web-Marker at http://knutties.livejournal.com/26579.html.

  2. Natarajan,
    Thanks for pointing this out. I will try it. I saw annodex mentioned in your blog. I did not know about CMML till I saw it in your blog. Looks cool. This is something I was looking for.

    We built a prototype called Hyperscope that uses annotea as the annotation protocol a couple of years ago. But those are just text annotations and I was looking for voice and video annotations. It will be interesting to annotate video/voice with text and vice versa.

    — Dorai

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