November 17, 2010

• Inner Entity Linking and Metadata

  The future of the internet is going to be in making hyperlinking far more easy, powerful, fluid, and flexible. We’re already seeing that happen with url shortening and twitter and wikis.  But what has always bothered me a lot is that there’s never been any super easy way to link to things INSIDE content. There’s simply no reason that I shouldn’t be able to trivially link directly to a comment that I wrote on someone’s blog or a single paragraph within my blog.

  We are seeing a little bit of the latter. There’s a wordpress plugin that allows a blogger to create paragraph level links easily. It’s not popular yet but it’s an awesome idea and should be implemented much more widely.

  For videos you should also be able to link to any arbitrary segment. Some video sharing sites do provide mechanisms to allow people to specify segments but the process is clunky and it’s different for every single site.  It should be as simple as html. Simpler even ideally.  Videos should have metadata tagging specific sections of the video that you can easily see and point to or embed with a hyperlink with a simple hashtag syntax. Or as you’re watching a video the sections should be mouseover highlightable so you can right click and get the url to the specific section you want. For more complex lnking you should be able to specify start and end time in some consistent format.

  Music should DEFINITELY have this feature. There should be tags in every audio file that specify various segments of the music as the chorus or the opening or the various verses. That way I could very easily write a program that when given a link to an audio file clips out the first 10 seconds of the chorus and appends it to the beginning of a different audio file fading out as the other audio file begins. Right now identifying where the “chorus” begins in an audio file is difficult without human intervention and that’s just silly.

  The desire to do that last thing is of course the thing that inspired this blog post.

  Of course tagging these files could be a community process or a wiki-like process so that not every artist needs to be tech-savvy enough to know how to specify the metadata themselves.

  Once these things exist the internet will become perfect and we can all go home and get back to our regularly scheduled lives.

  • 8:51 pm
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