The different contexts through which we see the world can be fascinating and profound. Think: Saddam Hussein as cosy ally (1983) vs Saddam Hussein as an axis of evil (2003).

And different contexts present a huge challenge when it comes to searching video: if a picture paints a thousand words, and video clocks up 24 pictures a second, we’re talkin’ 24,000 words a second.

Lots of complexity. Huge challenge to search with precision.

I was reminded of ‘big picture’ differences in context recently in a great documentary called ‘The Fog of War’.

Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense under Lyndon Johnson was talking about how the US went into the Vietnam War in the context of the Cold War (with the overarching aim to stop the spread of communism).

By contrast, the Vietnamese context (he learned much later) was civil war.

And with the benefit of hindsight now, he believed things may have been different if the two sides had taken the trouble to understand each other's context upfront.

The human cost of this clash of contexts was 58,000 Americans, 520 Australians and millions of Vietnamese dead. OK, so I’ve made the point that context is important, even profoundly so.

Where is all this leading?
The ability to capture context was one of the key ideas behind the design of Tagmotion, as a tool for tagging and searching video. (Nice segue, huh?).

We made the assumption that – with more and more video on the web, and with more people searching it - being able to use context as a shorthand, higher-level way of navigating it will become more and more useful.

And we made a couple of other assumptions:

1. Keyword search is just as limited with video as with text content. If not more so.
2. These limitations are due in no small part to the fact that keywords are flat. No higher or lower levels. No hierarchy. No context.
3. These limitations will be amplified as the volume of online video grows.
With me so far?

Example
Imagine the thousands of hours of video created in a Big Brother series.
I know, I know, why do that to yourself.
By browsing a ‘tag catalog’ containing terms like the examples below, and clicking on terms that describe what you’re interested in, you'll find what you're after without the trial and error we've become so used to with keyword search.

Housemate
        > Fred

Behavior
        > Bullying

Week 1
        > Monday

Here, you'd click on each of these three terms to create a ‘compound query’.
It would give you search results consisting of all the video of  Fred bullying other housemates from Monday of Week 1.

But if you tried to find this content using keyword search, you wouldn’t have the benefit of browsing the tags to see what video was available.
You’d have to know exactly the right words to type in.

And a tag cloud that attempted to contain all the tags describing (even) a Big Brother series would be hopelessly impractical.

A knowledge tree of tags lets you to discover what’s there to be viewed.
And in an application like Tagmotion, it lets you select one or more of the tags to form ‘compound queries’ like this Big Brother example.

So in this way, Tagmotion is an antidote to the 'hit or miss' nature of keyword search.

Here, 'Behavior' is the context for 'Bullying'. So you can navigate down through the tree to a very specific (lower level) term like 'bullying' from a contextual (higher level) term like Behavior.

There.
My first blog post done and dusted.
Taking you on an uplifting journey from the Vietnam War to Big Brother.
From the depressing to the ridiculous.
Off to a flyer, eh?

Do you think the idea of browsing knowledge trees to find video has merit?
Do you think keyword search will always rule?
I'll show you how we're using Tagmotion, and how SEO fits the picture in subsequent posts.