Videos & Podcasts

Podcasts

I could not find any useful podcasts on sites like Podomatic, so I did not use any for my project.

Just in case you do not know what a podcast is, see below:

"A podcast is a series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and downloaded through web syndication." A single episode of a podcast can be thought of as a talk-radio show or an editorial on TV news or a TV news segment. These podcasts are delivered to listeners by subscribing to them; some are delivered on a regular basis while others are not so regular.

Video Search

Personally, I use video search on a daily basis. I go on Youtube to watch the newest videos of web talent I subscribe to. I go on Hulu to catch up on my favorite shows. But for this project (at least the research portion), video is not very helpful for collecting information. There is a lot of information out there about coffee itself (e.g. how to roast coffee, but not for up to date news.

Video searches are rather limited to entertainment: the bulk of what's out there viral content that's user generated or medium like TV shows, music, movies. The only educational or informational use would be videos taken from TV news or filmed by a professional organization related to the topic. However, first, that stuff is boring. Not too many people are interested in watching every piece of news online when they can read it. Second, no one wants to spend their time uploading videos no one else cares about. Furthermore ,there's issues regarding copy rights.

Nonetheless, I did use two video search engines sporadically and found some use for them.

Usage of Video Search in this Project

Below, I review my usage of Truveo and Youtube during the project.

Name: Truveo
Access: Truveo
Frequency: Once or twice.
Information: Truveo claims to be one of the largest and most widely used video search engines, indexing over 300 million videos and reaching 75 million unique visitors every month across all websites it powers. It allows you to select specific channels like veoh, fox amazon, and whatever other sites your query turned up on. This is a great way to filter content.
Query:

  • Starbucks: I began with 36248 results, and after unchecking anything not related to news, I was able to get it down to 5544 - go try it yourself. I can then also rank by time as opposed to top ranked. But I found that Top Rank yielded more relevant results. An example of a good result would be news video from CBS News or another one from Fidelity. Because the video pops up in the window itself, I cannot link it.

Evaluation: (5/10) Although watch news online wasn't an intended part of the project. Truveo makes it easy to sort through the content if I need to find something. The best part of the site is definitely the filtering feature. But video content is still subpar to text because for the most part, the anchor just announce the news and that's it. There is no analysis, there isn't really any thick content. And it is much faster to read than to listen.
Miscellaneous: Something that irks me was that there's a "select all" feature, but no "select none" feature. So to pick out the new sites, I had to UNCHECK everything else for the few news site on the list.

Go here for an index of all the tools I used.
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