The objective of the VideoTagGame is to collect time-based annotations of the video which could then enable the retrieval of relevant parts in a video when a search is performed, rather than returning the entire video itself. These annotations are collected in the context of a multi-player game.

How To Play

To play the VideoTagGame, participants must sign in with their Yahoo! ID and join a new game. There will always be at least three players in each game. After a 3-second countdown, the video will begin to play. As it plays, participants enter tags that correspond to the various parts of the video. When two players agree on a tag (that is, they enter the same tag), they each get points. The closer together the tags were entered, the more points are rewarded. After the video ends, participants can then watch as it plays again, this time with the tags overlaid on top of the video.

The game, like Google Image Labeler, can be both fun and challenging for those involved. Think it sounds easy? Don't be fooled - the other participants are often fast typers capable of of entering nearly a hundred tags during a couple minutes of footage.

The VideoTagGame is a fun time-waster for those who like to play online games. It's similar to the games at the site Gwap ("games with a purpose"), launched by Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science, as it uses "the human processor," too. Like the GWAP games, the end result of the VideoTagGame is the possibility of enabling new technology for searching within videos...or your name at the top of the scoreboard...whichever one sounds more exciting to you.

I regularly check the MyBlogLog widget on a new blog I discover to see if I recognize the faces of other recent readers, as a way to get a feel for the site's community. BlogJuice takes that practice and amplifies its usefulness by orders of magnitude.

I'm sure this is only the beginning of what can be done with MyBlogLog and I'm very excited to see what comes next. As I said when the MyBlogLog API launched, for all the good discussion around Data Portability, MyBlogLog is making things happen quickly. It's being done through proprietary technology, under the umbrella of one particular vendor, but damn is it hot.

It's not often that a tool comes along that I can imagine myself using every day. If BlogJuice holds up over time and traffic, this handy little service will join that list for me.