Development Seed Blog

Adding realtime metadata to videos

Below is a two minute video clip from Bill O'Reilly's May 11th episode of The Talking Points Memo. No, our beliefs haven't done an about face. I was experimenting with Viddler.com and decided to use it to fact check O'Reilly's show. I went in and, right on the video clip itself (thanks Viddler), tagged it and added comments to expose O'Reilly's bogus commentary. But why take my word? The video gets smarter as more metadata is added, so why don't you fact check my facts and post them as comments and add a few tags while you're in there? Just scroll over the dots in the segment to read my comments.

What is interesting about this clip is that O'Reilly isn't lying much (like he can). He's accurately quoting the source but being egregiously selective in the lines he quotes. He's doing what he does best and ignoring the complexity of the situation, instead playing up erroneously that there are two clear sides.

I'm curious to see how political campaigns use Viddler. Just imagine if a candidate's supporters use it to fact check a debate clip or exposed another candidate's spin. Or if a campaign does it themselves and uses its channels (and YouTube, of course) to get it out to the public. I can see it being used similarly to hypertext to simply allow people to better support statements and provide more information. If I were on a campaign, I would run a daily contest to see how many facts Talking Points gets wrong and offer supporters a way to get notified every time more than five erroneous statements are flagged by the community. Even riffing on your own candidate could be helpful. Like David Weinberger says, "discussing differences while standing on shared ground" can help faithful supporters get a better understanding of an issue.

Viddler could be a great tool to push news outlets for more accountability and less spin in their coverage. We know we need that. Maybe Media Matters will start using it to crowd source its political junkies.