As the number of webvideo sites continues to proliferate (as information online in general continues to grow) the most apparent challenge is wading through an overwhelmingly large quantity of content to find relevant, high quality material that is entertaining or of use for a particular purpose. This morning I discovered Dabble via a CNN Business 2.0 link to the post “Dabbling With Video Search: A Conversation with Mary Hodder.”
Dabble not only uses complex computer-based algorithms to index posted webvideo on sites like YouTube, Revver and Google Video, but also tracks “gestures” which are the social meta-tagging actions of thousands of users on these sites creating playlists, tags and favorites. According Dabble CEO Mary Hodder, quoted in the post:
By allowing users in Dabble to add social data, like to make a playlist, search it , collect it, or tag it—by getting people to tell us why that data is important—is how to get the last 20 percent or 30 percent of value out of that data. We are taking gestures from both inside and outside Dabble. Socially, folks who care about video are making these sorts of gestures. As our community grows we will increasingly have better results.
This appears to be an extremely powerful formula. I have been wanting a meta-search tool like Dabble for webvideo for sometime. There are proliferating choices for webvideo, and the decision to choose one or more sites to utilize and “invest in” from a time perspective seems daunting. I’m using YouTube more (and really learned more about it’s power as a result of K-12 Online) but don’t want to restrict myself to YouTube video content only. Dabble looks great as a tool for harnessing the power of networks, which really is the transformative power of web 2.0 in my mind.