One Friday the Overlay.TV crew and I used our lunch time to partake in the annual Greek Fest. Trays of Greek goodness, including gyros, souvlaki, spanakopita, and baklava were devoured by our team. Then with full guts we all headed back to work ... if you could call it that. As is the case on many an afternoon after a hearty lunch, 2 o'clock hits and I'm ready for a nap, and I know I'm not the only one.

I work in a typical IT office where the work environment is open-concept, desks scattered about without partitions, and even those who are lucky enough to have an office, their doors are rarely shut, so napping at one's desk is not really an option. Gone are the days of Don Draper, when you could shut your door and take a quick afternoon kip without anyone the wiser. I've seen it hit many a time in afternoon meetings that go on a little too long, everyone gets a little punchy, and there's always the one guy in the corner, his head bobbing and weaving, as he desperately tries to maintain his tenuous grip on wakefulness. What's a guy or gal to do when the afternoon sleepies get the better of him or her? Is an office nap room the answer?

Our CEO's answer to that would be a resolute NO. I believe Rob's exact words were "If you need to take a nap at work, then you probably shouldn't be at work." Touché. Probably why he's a CEO and I'm not. But there is an ever increasing school of thought that thinks taking a nap at work may actually increase productivity, and that a nap room just may be the answer.

One of my co-workers thinks the idea is silly, and that if you to need to recharge then you should just go home and take a nap. But that is not necessarily a convenient option for some, if for instance you live far away, or you don't drive to work. I live not too far, but far enough that walking isn't an option and I don't drive. I'm certainly not going to spend valuable napping time on the ol' chariot of the proletariat (that's the bus for all you car folks) just to take a twenty minute nap.

I have to say that while I find the idea of being able to take a midday nap appealing, there is something socially awkward about napping next to one's co-worker, it's just a little too familiar. But the work landscape has changed to one where flip-flops and jeans are acceptable work attire for most, so perhaps shared nap time with a co-worker is not such a bizarre concept and nap rooms will become as common as washrooms in most office places, but it is still a long way off from being the norm.

For now I'll just sleep under my desk.

Find out who else is napping at work and why:

Who is Napping?

The Nap that Refreshes

On-the-Job Naps Might Cut Risk for Heart Problems

More Bosses Encourage Napping on Job

Delphi Question: Nap Room

France to Let Workers Nap on the Job

Bangkok Office Introduces Daily Nap Time

And check out MetroNaps a company that "enhances workforce productivity through mid-day napping equipment and education." Neat.

nap · nap rooms · office napping · productivity · recharge

Why in-video context inference is so difficult

Google AdSense changed the world of online advertising, using standard Information Retrieval techniques to match ad inventory with web pages. This has opened new possibilities for advertisers to get a better bang for their buck and send the right message to the right audience. Can the same be done for video? Easier said than done.

Web pages lend themselves nicely for textual analysis. Not only can content be stemmed, counted for term frequency and enhanced semantically, cues in an HTML document such as headings, page title and metadata provide a much richer base for context inference.

Video, on the other hand, is a much tougher nut to crack. It is unstructured to begin with and has much fewer metadata elements that could be of any use in drawing semantic conclusions. Nevertheless, video is what web users are now consuming more than ever. The number of clips served daily by video sharing and premium content sites is staggering, and so is the ever-increasing time users spend on online entertainment.

It is, therefore, not surprising that more advertising dollars are now being diverted to online media on the expense of traditional TV campaigns. However, the fundamental question still begs – can this money be spent more effectively delivering not only the right message to the right audience, but also at the right time?

Time introduces the most challenging factor in video advertising. While concepts discussed on a web page are linear for reading but parallel to access (the whole page shows as one piece in the browser), scenes in a video are temporal and can only be consumed sequentially. Not only do we need to wait for content to be streamed to our client before we can scan it, skimming over the timeline is not quite the same as scrolling up and down a web page. To this, lets add lack of anchors and in-content links to realize that inter- and intra- navigation in a video space is very different from navigation in hypertext.

So how can advertisers tap into this elusive medium and deliver contextual messaging? Currently, with great difficulty and without much success. One can obviously use the surrounding textual information of the embedding page as well as look at the video title, description and tags to make some assumptions as to what the video is all about; but that would be like drawing similar conclusions based on a whole web site rather than at the page level – to use a web analogy. Nothing in and around the video can actually tell us much about the particular scenes or even define when those start and finish.

Better tools are, therefore, needed - if visual data is of not much help then how about audio? That, indeed, is the flavor of the month in contextual video advertising with companies using speech-to-text techniques to transform audio-visual data to temporal text signals to drive good old semantic analysis. Alas, verbal information only captures a small fraction of what actually goes on in a video. It is enough to consider narration over background visuals in a documentary or the stylishly rich details of a music video clip to see how so much information is lost in this translation.

There is no silver bullet to automate this just yet. No clever algorithm – trained, unsupervised, adaptive or other – can come close to an average person’s ability to easily describe what they see in a video. Any person, you say? Why not use plenty of those then? By the laws of large numbers, they’re bound to reasonably describe it collectively.

Stay tuned for the next post on crowd-sourcing context inference in video and why advertisers should care.

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"Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!"

Okay, that was just an excuse to throw that line in, because that's all I heard, well variations of it anyway, anytime anyone in the office brought up the development of our badge widget. I'm pleased to announce that we actually have badges, and they don't stink. "What is a badge?" you ask. Well, it's a pretty awesome little tool that can be embedded on your blog or website to facilitate easy sharing of Overlays that you like, without having to embed each Overlay individually. Your badge could show your own Overlays, Overlays from a specific user, most recent Overlays, most creative, and so on. Below is my own badge that shows my three most recent Overlays, that will update as I add more. To embed my badge simply click "Get It!" and copy the embed code.

To grab a badge from our site, go to whatever Overlay.TV section or user you would like to feature and click on the "GET BADGE" icon, copy the embed code, and paste it on your own blog or website.

badges · blogs · Overlay.TV · tools · Treasure of the Sierra Madre · widgets

I will let the video below do the talking. Feel free to turn the Overlay off using the second button on the top left, but I propose that if product placement is going to be integrated into the storyline of a video then the advertiser should be able to assert that the video/product be clickable.

I love Black Eyed Peas, and I love this video - so I added a few links to the various CDs that I could find with Overlay.TV affiliate partners. Feel free to edit this video, share it, or add the products yourself so you can collect a commission when someone clicks on the products.

After all, RIM probably didn't know we were going to do this - we all might as well cash in!Neilsen has recently released their Product Placement stats. Here are the top dogs:

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When it comes to advertising, content alone is not enough anymore. If we rely purely on a narrative then we as advertisers end up battling Hollywood for attention span. The silver bullet in this battle is to not only infer context, some information about where that user is and what they are doing, but also to relate that context to the activity stream of the user, and if possible tie it in with that stream.

As a viewer it is arguable that we can find this kind of intrusion Orwellian. And in many cases, left in the hands of direct marketers, without strong creative campaigns to support this advanced kind of buying, it will be regarded as ultimately intrusive. We need to resist the urge to go out and buy ads right into activity streams that are ultimately task-oriented. If I am reading or even writing an email, viewing family portraits, then I am engaging in a type of task that has a logical beginning, middle and end. Given this one could argue that this is a bad time to try and reach me with a message, even if it is mail or image oriented.

BUT, if you can intercept my intent, and offer me a different way to engage in the task that has some benefit that I wasn't previously aware of or hadn't acted on yet - then you can gain my attention and insert your experience into that dialogue.

This requires the highest degrees of collaboration between client, agency, creative, media planning, ad platforms and publishers - sophistication that many would argue is not readily available today. There would obviously need to be workflows created in order for this kind of activity to reach the mainstream, but in the interim I am looking for good case studies that bend these paradigms together successfully and engage audiences in a highly relevant, timely and effective storytelling exercise that has direct impact on the outcome for the user in that experience.

The following video gives us a view into how top agencies such as Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, R/GA, JWT and radical.media are thinking about this. Very interesting times indeed...

This video shot as part of the Young Lions series at Cannes 2008 was sponsored by Nokia.

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One of the coolest features of Overlay.TV is the ability to use the bookmarklet (grab it from your MyPage) to create Overlays on videos in place and then save it to Overlay.TV and share it right from there to your blog.

What most bloggers don't know is that once you have done that you can actually fine tine or edit the Overlay in place on your blog. Try it using these four easy steps.

1. Go to YouTube and find one of your videos and select the Overlay.TV Bookmarklet
2. When the editor opens add a simple widget like Link and give it some information to work with (URL, title, image)
3. Save the Overlay and then share it to your blog by using the Share button on the lower right of the editor, picking your size and copying/pasting the code into your blog.
4. Preview or view your blog and hit Edit on the Overlay.TV player.

I find this particularly useful because I can quickly assemble the basic Overlay while writing the blog post and then fine tune the Overlay in place on the blog as I work. I did a quick example here on CarpVillage.com, and the entire process from shooting the interview through to editing the Overlay on my blog took about 35 minutes (I did not edit or optimize the video at all).

blog · blogger · edit · Overlay.TV · share · workflow

Cuil, Kewl or Cool: July 28, 2008 Week in Review

News Items, Press Releases and Product Announcements

• Cuil (pronounced "cool") the new search engine launched.  Described as the "Google killer", it has met with mixed reviews.
• Got a note that Veeple.com is ramping up.  Veeple has plans to help you monetize video streams. It comes from Silicon Valley.  Seems similar to what Ottawa's Overlay.TV is doing.  Except I think Overlay.TV does it better.  Speaking of Overlay - they just moved into 0.9 Beta.  Keep track of them on their blog.
• AppAppeal is a directory of reviews of Web 2.0 sites.  Get a list of the major sites under topics like "Travel" or "Shopping" or "Dating" (good if you want to target certain sites for advertising).  Each site listed also has a review and a rating.  Good for getting a super-high level overview of a Web 2.0 vertical.

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Today I start blogging at Overlay.TV and I wanted to set the stage with an idea I have been working on for some time about the problem with context. My colleague Nadav Zin also spends a fair amount of time thinking about this and we bring different and balanced perspectives to the ideas, challenges and what this means for Overlay.TV, and all social media platforms in general.

I will be posting a deck and paper I am working on in the next month or so about "living in video" but I think it only fair that I point to one of the great thinkers, Dr. Michael Wesch from KSU, and the most important platform ever in the history of the internet for study of this issue, YouTube. I have Overlayed Dr. Wesch's video below with some links to the various subjects he discusses to make it a hopefully more useful resource (and to give it some context).

This video is not the point. The subject of the video is. Michael discusses what he calls "Context Collapse" which is the phenomenon formed by millions of anonymous viewers watching millions of anonymous clips, which may or may not have a thread that holds them together. This is compounded the comfort level of the new announcers/stars, the skillset to derive a level of quality in production and implicit semantics of the distribution of this content. What is most interesting about this compound fracture of media as we know it is that it really doesn't matter. What matters is that it is happening, and the volume to which it is happening outpaces the entire history of ABC every six months.Lev Grossman from Time Magazine sums it up with his thoughts on YouTube comments quite well. "Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and naked hatred."

What can be inferred about the content from the thoughts of the viewers?

What can we learn from how people do what they do online now?

What is the long term impact of this shift in media centricity?

I want to explore these semantics more. I want to learn and therefore live with this in mind in all that I do. I think we have only begun to scratch the surface of what this means, but I absolutely intend to keep on scratching.

anthropology · anti-pattern · comments · context · michael wesch · online video · pattern · semantics · youtube