Jon Udell’s got a post today that discusses the controversial Paul Graham comments from OSCON about Java. Jon’s point was mostly about the challenges of rich media with respect to searching and indexing. As he puts it:
the best way to pierce the opaqueness of large media files is to point into them, and then wrap the pointers with words that the search engines can see.
Can’t disagree with him there. But my basic problem with it is that it’s still a highly manual process. An individual has to decide what to link in to, and then decide what the keywords are for that particular comment. But unless the whole file is linked, I think things will get missed.
As an example, I haven’t seen anybody yet discuss the comment from Dave Winer yet from his audio here about 21:12 in, when he states that Microsoft perceives Gmail as a “serious threat.” And that – devoid of context – would be just another piece of speculation. But given where Winer was earlier in the week it takes on a different level of significance. Without that context however, or a full index of the audio clip, things like that get missed.
So Jon’s probably right in that this is the best way to make audio searchable right now, but it’s far from a perfect solution.
