The Media Supermarket

Search engines can easily read and process text, although not in natural language yet. They actually “love” text because it can easily help them make sense of the pages they are crawling. The challenge with images and videos is that search engines cannot “read” them, yet.
They rely on the tags, descriptions, and the title of the page to categorize and index images and videos.
A good idea to help search engines understand these media better is to encourage users to describe, instead of comment on them. The typical comments to a video are; “nice”, “cool”, “very bad” etc… Nothing descriptive of the image or video.
Implementing this would give you two main advantages:

1. Better indexing for your pages: since your page will be full of relevant keywords that actually describe your content, the search engines will find it much easier. This is especially beneficial for sites with huge content, in leveraging a very long tail of keywords. Someone looking for “dog with green shirt” will definitely land on your page if a user described it this way. Moreover, the user will be happy to have found exactly what he is looking for.

2. Rich user experience: having a synopsis of a video, or a creative description for an image will help the viewer in recognizing certain things they would have not recognized otherwise. A new angle, or a special detail would give the content a new perspective. This would especially helpful with videos, since many times you wait several minutes hoping it is the content you are looking for, and then discover it is not. This way users are prepared for what they will watch.

Implementation

It is not as easy as it sounds (I have yet to test it and see for myself) especially if you have users already user to just drop simple comments.

A good idea might be to introduce descriptions with (and eventually replace) comments. Users who don’t want to write descriptions can vote for each description. This way, the best description rises in position and gives new users the best description available.

The level of interaction with the content goes up when people try to describe, instead of just venting their impressions. The number of people participating will definitely be less, because naturally, it is more difficult to describe than to just comment. I think it is a risk worthy of taking, to improve the way people use your service and to differentiate it among competitors.

There has been a lot of talk about the non-linearity of the world, and change. Quantum mechanics teaches us that change happens in bounces and stages, instead of increments. Chris Anderson talks about the non-linear long tail, and how disproportionate the different pieces are in terms of their share of the “pie”. Seth Godin wants us to forget the tail, and focus on the head because of the disproportionate rewards and because “the winner takes it all”.
I have personally observed that the road from becoming an F student to C student is shorter and easier than the road from A to A+. I have also noticed a jump in my skill in certain things that I am learning. All of a sudden, there is more clarity in handling the skill, and there is a distinctive difference in the amount of comfort and confidence in dealing with it.
We can easily demonstrate that, by observing the explosion in popularity of some of the biggest websites, that did not exist several years ago.
The immediate reaction might be to embark on a “non-linear way of thinking and operating” due to these facts and to the nature of change.
Although we need to take this into serious consideration we should remember that we are linear. We as humans have certain limitations that allow us to only do so many things at once, and therefore we should seriously consider that we are bound to act in a linear way.
You can only say one thing at a time, sell one customer at a time, and learn a certain number of words per day.
We should stick to the “old” way of improving our business and learning, and that is, by doing the maximum we can do per day - every day. Then every now and then, we will experience a jump (or a fall) in our performance due to the combined efforts (or lack thereof) and to some dots that became connected.
The point is not to be fooled by the hope of getting very lucky and forgetting about the importance of hard work and patience.

Google finally decided to share the volume data of the search queries that they receive. This is too good to be true for someone like me living on these numbers. Now you can see the number of searches conducted per keyword, instead of the relative volume that was given previously, and was only segmented in five main segments.
It is generally estimated that 80% of all internet traffic starts at a search engine. And since Google accounts for almost 80% of search engine traffic, this is quite a good estimate for the market per keyword. This means you have a fair idea about 64% of the total market.
This marks a new era in market research and how scientific you can be in estimating your market size, and how much of it you are getting.Moreover, “market” is no longer a set of people with generalized demographics. It can now be measured by the number of people who are interested in a concept (or group of concepts) as specific as you define it.
I tried the service once, but then it seems it crashed, I’m sure a huge number of people is trying it. I’ll test it more extensively and compare with actual traffic figures that I have to see how best to use it.