Suggestion: Tagging for clips

It’s clear that a huge amount of effort has gone into fine-grained annotation in the form of things like the soundslice tab.

A coarser-grained thing that would help make it easier to filter for information of interest would be to support tags for content chunks (I’m thinking mainly about “video clips”). Even if you can’t allocate much resource to performing the tagging yourself, opening things up to user-submitted tags could probably go a long way to helping make the mountain of information more useful for everybody.

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Excellent suggestion - we already built it!

I was actually going to start a thread for this, to explain how it works, because it’s a core part of what we’re trying to do here.

Basically, what is the point of having one million (Dr. Evil voice) hours of video if you can’t find anything? Why can’t I go on Netflix and find all the chase scenes, or all the fight scenes, or all the appearances of a certain actor, or all the times a certain song plays? The world is accumulating massive quantities of video data, but nobody can search it. So metadata for that video material is going to be the next big step.

This kind of searching is even more critical for an instructional platform like ours. Why can’t you go on our platform and find all the times someone talks about sweeping, or pickslanting, or the diminished scale, or anything else? Well now you can.

Well, not right now, but soon! The “T” topics in interview timelines are actually tags, and they’re generic. We can apply them to any video, and any time range within a video. We haven’t built the search screen for this yet, so it’s not apparent. But soon you’ll be able to see all the tags we’ve added to all videos, organized by category - people, places, bands, techniques, etc. You will not only be able to find the videos these things occur in, but you’ll be able to click to go to the precise start time where the tag occurs, just as you can now in video timelines, and in the “References” tab on clips pages.

We’re still adding all these annotations. And we have considered adding a “suggest tag” button on video and clip pages. We already built the database structure for it. Sounds like that’s something you’d use, and that’s awesome - we won’t always be able to find or anticipate the things users want to annotate, so you can help us out in that regard.

When it comes to searching on different types of audio material - songs and exercises, mainly - we plan to implement that a different way, not as a tag, since that type of category usually applies to a whole video.

So, yes, coming soon! Any other thoughts on how we implement these features, list them here and we’ll take note.

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Glad to hear it’s in the works! :smiley:

Another suggested detail offhand: support negation in search. So for example I could do a compound search such as: “two-way pickslanting” and “not John McLaughlin”.

And showing a tally of the number of occurences of each tag in the current search results would be super useful. Lots of product search implementations do something like this for product parameters. Shopping for an amp on Sweetwater is a good example of this concept. But you may be looking at a larger number of parameters than is typically found in “product feature” filtering, so something more dynamic, that lets you sort the list of tags by number of occurences remaining, or alphabetically would be useful. Depending on the feedback you’d get on something like that, you might want to able to, say, toggle whether the alphabetical sorting includes tags with a current count of “zero” for the current search filter or not.

I can see how this sort of thing is a balancing act of providing features without confusing people with too much complexity, especially if lots of users are accessing the material through a phone or tablet. But some kind of real-time feedback about the remaining tag counts in the current search results is something I think would be very useful.

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