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Jim Lanzone: Vengeance in Video?

Written on September 15, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Advertising, marketing

In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.

Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”

What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports:

[Clicker] creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.

The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.

Clicker will also allow users to edit and submit information about shows wiki-style.

My question: what’s with all those vowels?! Are you sure you didn’t mean “clickr”? Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, guys.

Naturally, the first real question is what’s their business model. And the answer is typical of search engines: advertising, both search and display. However, they also plan to offer premium accounts, “which the company envisions might be used for storing your favorite videos online, kind of like a DVR of sorts.”

We’re obviously still learning new things about how to do online video all the time, as Hulu has shown us. But is there room for another video search engine—and if so, will Clicker be it? What do you think?

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Jim Lanzone: Vengeance in Video?

A Step toward Semantic: Google Gets RDFa, Facebook Capabilities

Written on September 15, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, marketing

Lest we forget, social networks aren’t the only copycats. Search engines certainly do their fair share of feature and markup poaching, as evidenced this week by Google’s latest video search additions: understanding the microformat data from Facebook Share and Yahoo SearchMonkey RDFa.

Oh, sure, Google says they’re in it to help us find more (and more relevant) videos. As if their mission were cataloguing the world’s information and, like, making it accessible.

Oh wait.

Google’s Webmaster Central blog announces the new capabilities to provide more contextual data about a video as a way for webmasters to get their videos seen in search results. (Previous help in this area came from video sitemaps and mRSS.) The post notes:

Both of these markup formats allow you to specify information essential to video indexing, such as a video’s title and description, within the HTML of a video page. While we’ve become smarter at discovering this information on our own, we’d certainly appreciate some hints directly from webmasters. Also, to maximize the chances that we find the markup on your video pages, you should make sure it appears in the HTML without the execution of JavaScript or Flash.

The full recommended code, including the embedded video (with a generic video ID), is available in the post and adds a meta (Facebook) or span (RDFa) elements to provide a title and description of the video.

The use of microformats like RDFa is hailed as a step toward the semantic web, since microformats are used to help convey meaning along with information—to help users and especially compatible software to better understand the data provided. They’re one of the more straightforward methods of adding meaning and delineating relationships in code.

But, of course, there’s no word on how this will integrate with YouTube, or whether adding microformat data to the embed code of a video hoested on another site will help it compete with relevant YouTube videos.

What do you think? Will you be using microformats to add more info to your videos for search engines? Do you host your videos on YouTube or somewhere else, and what kind of competition do you face?

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A Step toward Semantic: Google Gets RDFa, Facebook Capabilities