YouTube is, in the words of the creators themselves, "an online video streaming service that allows anyone to view and share videos that have been uploaded by [their] members." For the sake of my argument, let us assume that they are telling the truth.
The various movie clips hosted on the site are divided into a number of fairly broad, predefined categories. However, the site also allows the author (or uploader; not all members of youtube own the rights to the material they post) to add a number of "tags," or keywords that do not necessarily conform to any previously defined structure. As far as I can tell, other users cannot add tags to a movie clip, but they are able to rate the quality of the clip from 1 to 5 and can also post comments.
By combining strict categories with free-form tags, YouTube manages to capture the best of two worlds, in a sense. It offers precision and flexibility in allowing the uploaders to pick the words that best describe the content of their (or others') creations, while simultaneously dodging the trap of nonsensical keywords by allowing the alternative route of a more traditional hierarchy. A possible drawback is that users cannot add tags to movie clips posted by others, but I'm guessing that it is a choice they have made to prevent abuse.
Next to each movie clip is a brief list of "related" files, apparently based on tags. Most of the clips linked in this way seem relevant. Indeed, I have spent more than just a few hours hopping between related movie clips on YouTube. Rarely have I been disappointed while doing so.
Another highly interesting function that I have noticed is that each movie clip comes with a record of sites that have linked to it. This offers an effective overview of the clip's popularity in a global context and fits well with the notion of user-created networks, social or otherwise.
http://www.youtube.com/
3 件のコメント:
In this post you mentioned that "[i]t offers precision and flexibility in allowing the uploaders to pick the words that best describe the content of their (or others') creations, while simultaneously dodging the trap of nonsensical keywords by allowing the alternative route of a more traditional hierarchy".
One of the major problems with the tag system is that it often does not end up to be that accurate. For example, in Wikipedia when reading about social bookmarking, this is mentioned as disadvantages of the tag system,
"no standard set of keywords (also known as controlled vocabulary), no standard for the structure of such tags (e.g. singular vs. plural, capitalization, etc.), mistagging due to spelling errors, tags that can have more than one meaning, unclear tags due to synonym/antonym confusion, highly unorthodox and "personalized" tag schemas from some users, and no mechanism for users to indicate hierarchical relationships between tags (e.g. a site might be labeled as both cheese and cheddar, with no mechanism that might indicate that cheddar is a refinement or sub-class of cheese)".
Therefore, I simply wonder if you considered this when writing the post? I also wonder if you think this affects the accuracy of the tag system in a broader sense?
Response to Kristoffer:
Yes, I did take the disadvantages of tagging into consideration. While I believe that what the Wikipedia article describes is a worst-case scenario and not particularly common, it is important to have a "backup plan," should the tags become exceedingly deviant. YouTube's "Categories" page functions as an alternative way of finding recent submissions, and while they should add more categories (there are currently 12) and possibly sub-categories, I feel that they're very much on the right path.
As for tagging in a broader sense, it has the potential of becoming more accurate than a traditional top-to-bottom hierarchy, since it basically allows users to use narrower and more precise keywords. However, can obviously backfire due to misunderstandings, sabotage or plain stupidity on the users' part. As it stands, it is probably a better idea to combine the two types of categorization rather than choose one or the other.
Hello Jonas!
It was a while ago now that we spoke.
...and I do too like Youtube - if just for the size of it.
But the video and audio quality though, really isn't that good.
Compare it to http://stage6.divx.com/, a site that isn't as big and inclusive as Youtube, but has quite a few clips in HD (720p and 1080p).
They are also pretty big when it comes to anime.
Check it out if you like...
/Göran Sernhed
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