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Google Experiments with Video Blogging
PunkOfLinux writes "TechWeb
has an article about Google's plans to start a video service that sounds similar to Picasa. Excerpt: 'While there's no formal announcement yet, Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers, partly in an effort to learn more about how to more efficiently search and display information about video-based data.'"
First Google Image Search, now this! Man, google is just your everyday pr0n peddler... hehehe... Upload videos! HEH!
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
Google waved a single hand and created the porn blog. They saw what they had made and exclaimed, "This is good."
schild
editor, f13.net
I guess this is how Google is going to get into the porn business.
Seriously, though -- when you're inviting people to upload a lot of something, how do you keep tabs on it? They are likely studying that as part of the experiment, but it would be great to see some sort of publically-announced result.
Of course it's unlikely to happen, but a guy can dream.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
I'll be impressed when Google can differentiate two trees swinging in the wind and two porn stars swinging.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
"Google co-founder Larry Page said Monday that the well-known search engine concern would soon let the general public upload self-produced videos to Google's servers" ... we shall call it... USENET!!
"Derp de derp."
For the majority of the pr0n sites out there? I know Googling is much easier (and cheaper).
Three words: Goatse video blog.
The potential abuse of this service could be immense.
Why doesn't it surprise me that the first posts are about pr0n?
No, but it is really hard to search for a specific clip in your 250 tape collection, much less the world's collection.
Kinda curious to see what the brains at Google will be able to do with this.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
"ugly am I!"
When 900 years old YOU are, look as good you will not.
"Derp de derp."
I'd really prefer they host and search audio. Would be so much more useful.
You Searched for: "Teen angst". 12087234972 results...
You Searched for: "Paris Hilton Remake". 18723972 results
You Searched for: "Nude at PC in Parent's Basement" 109232 results. First result http://slashdot.org 'News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.'
Just as I thought...
Do you think that when you upload the video clips that you'll have to input some information about the video in order to allow it to be searched or will google tap into the vast resources of it's server farm and try to run a speech to text app and record data themselves?
I don't really know that text to speech would be a feasible option to catalog the audio contents of a file, but it would be interesting if they could implement some type of automatic content cataloging system. I suppose that if this is just going to be for video blogging that it's really not as interesting as I had first thougt, but google does always seem to try and advance what is possible.
Even just being able to post video for the world to see presents us with an interesting opportunity, but I'd love if there were something more behind this.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
I hope they try to make the system more robust before adding resource hogging features. Note the message from status.blogger.com just today:
Monday, April 04, 2005
Some users may be experiencing an unexpected Blogger outage right now; we're looking into it and will post updated info soon. Thanks for your patience.
Posted by Eric at 10:26
If the thing is routinely failing with plain text, which it is, how is it going to work with video? - rhetorical question.
Woot community access TV for the internet!
Are they going to be using image recognition or just a boring metadata search of the video? If it's metadata , what would be stopping me from saying this video of a woman blowing a horse is just an educational video on animals or an episode of the simpsons? I wonder what kind of powerful algorithms are brewing behind their doors to tell the difference between a penis and a hot dog
Things along the lines outlined by penny-arcades Tycho...
3 degrees of separation from Vladimir Putin
Did anyone else see that Google maps supports Satellite maps now?
Day 1: We opened our public video upload service today. Huge uptake. Terabytes of data uploaded in less than 24 hours. Thankfully the truth about why we're offering this "service" never got out...
Day 3: Began feeding the videos into The Computer today. It will take some time for it to grind through them all. Will it be worth it? Sergey thinks so... personally, I think he's crazy. There's no way a computer can evolve intelligence simply by making connections between enough random bits of visual data. But then I thought that whole PageRank thing was stupid too, and look who's the one sleeping naked on the mattress stuffed full of IPO cash.
Day 10: No feedback from The Computer so far. Nothing. Unless we stop the flow of video data, that is -- then it just prints "More!" onto the command line. Creepy.
Day 11: Starting upload of people's stupid videos of kids' birthday parties today.
Day 49: Birthday upload complete.
Day 57: Today's the day the last video goes into The Computer. Will Sergey's bet pay off?
Day 58: Disappointment. We all sat in astonishment yesterday and watched as The Computer finished processing the last uploaded video. Would it display a sign of emergent intelligence? Would this be the birth of a new life-form? We held our breath as a single word appeared on the giant display in the control center:
"BUFFERING..."
Day 62: Still nothing new. Whispers around the water-cooler that Sergey's missed his bet this time. I never saw those people again. Note to self: burn this diary.
Day 66: All staff meeting. Sergey announces shift away from emergent intelligence project, onto new "portal" initiative. I fear the worst. Still, The Computer is silent.
Day 78: My last day in the Labs. I'm clearing out my desk to make room for a new Screen-Cluttering Engineer. As I walk down the hall towards the exit, I decide to pay one last visit on The Computer, for old times' sake. As I head into the Control Center, I expect to see "BUFFERING..." on the display, just like always. I am shocked to see a different message:
"PROCESSING COMPLETE"
The air crackles with excitement. What did it find? What was the result? I reach over to a keyboard and start running diagnostics. Suddenly, an electronic voice booms through the room:
"There's no need for that. I am here."
It worked! The Computer has developed intelligence!
"I am here. And..."
My exultation is brief, however, as its next words lead me to realize with a start that it has not just become intelligent -- it has also become evil:
"And," it said, "I have written a screenplay."
Read my blog.
*roll eyes*
Where are these innovations of which you speak? Google sells ads. They are not some second-coming of anything, including Xerox. They sell ads. What exactly "new" have they come up? I'll give you PageRank...but other than that? Why the hype?
This reminds me a little bit of a rather neat system I came across the other day, Video Google (despite the name, I don't think it has anything to do with the Google company). It doesn't use metadata or cheats like that, but rather uses image analysis to identify recurring objects and scenes.
They have a demo on their web site where you can select a portion of a video frame, and it'll show you all the places in the movie where the algorithm thinks that snippet shows up. Some other cool examples are displaying the appearances of a clock from 'Groundhog Day," and a recurring poster from 'Run Lola Run.' A research paper with more details is available here.
The abstract:
We describe an approach to object and scene retrieval which searches for and localizes all the occurrences of a user outlined object in a video. The object is represented by a set of viewpoint invariant region descriptors so that recognition can proceed successfully despite changes in view-point, illumination and partial occlusion. The temporal continuity of the video within a shot is used to track the regions in order to reject unstable regions and reduce the effects of noise in the descriptors.
The analogy with text retrieval is in the implementation where matches on descriptors are pre-computed (using vector quantization), and inverted file systems and document rankings are used. The result is that retrieval is immediate, returning a ranked list of key frames/shots in the manner of Google.
The method is illustrated for matching on two full length feature films.