Secret indexing weapon

Back in November I wrote about Asterpix, a video indexing site that can add hotspots with hyperlinks and annotations to videos hosted on YouTube, MySpace, Google, Brightcove, Veoh, Dailymotion, ESPN, Metacafe, and Break. I was, as I noted, blown away by the service. Now there’s a brilliant new addition to the service, the Asterbot.

Back in November I wrote about Asterpix, a video indexing site that can add hotspots with hyperlinks and annotations to videos hosted on YouTube, MySpace, Google, Brightcove, Veoh, Dailymotion, ESPN, Metacafe, and Break. I was, as I noted, blown away by the service.

Nat Kausik, the CEO of Asterpix, contacted me a while ago to let me know about a new addition to their service, the Asterbot. This subsystem spiders videos and scans them to find what the camera is tracking and automatically hotspots the areas of significance. Thus, in a wedding video that features a bride in a white dress a hotspot will be added automatically to what is her characteristic collection of pixels that are consistent over a significant number of frames.

That’s pretty clever as a way of jumpstarting the contextualization of video content but here’s where Asterbot is even more clever: It indexes any tags and text associated with the video and then attempts to extract the significant words and ranks them build ‘topics,’ which the video is related to. This is what the company describes as creating a “Rosetta Stone” of context by inference.

This is quite brilliant and underscores the great drive of the Internet: Add as much context and relevance to everything possible. It appears that we are trying to definitively and exhaustively catalog both the online and offline worlds. Without automated assistance such as that provided by Asterbot even the surface of the task couldn’t be scratched.

Most of Asterbot’s efforts are not immediately visible – the subsystem is indexing thousands of videos per day and its impact is hidden as it adds to the existing human created index. But it is when you find a new video that only Asterbot has indexed that you realize what a great idea this is! The effort of adding tags and comments is much easier when you don’t have to do all of the leg work (or rather finger work) to create the hotspots. Moreover the tags added by Asterbot appear, in general, remarkably accurate.

The success of Asterbot will be obvious if Asterpix becomes the de facto video search tool, which I think there’s a very good chance of. Nat, when Google or Microsoft buys you for some obscene amount of money, remember I called it.