Dabble and Video Search, Media Organising and More
Posted on July 26, 2006
Filed Under New Tools |
Dabble is about people describing, discovering and organizing video, wherever it’s found or hosted.
That’s a short and sweet introduction to Dabble which has some powerful minds making video on the web searchable, organiseable and shareable.
Dabble CEO and founder is Mary Hodder, ex-Berkeley and an expert and advocate in social and aggregation software and scurity and privacy.
“Dabble collects video data from 240 + hosting sites that accept video uploads from people, plus tens of thousands of independent sites. Dabble also collects other sorts of media like audio for searching and organizing. And Dabblers bookmark media they find around the web.”
Mary’s background at Napsterisation has led her to a formula where the tag and playlist formulations of users create the searchable data for other users, a ploy I wanted to use with Dexer and search terms a couple of years back.
Another exec at Dabble, Lisa Rein, is a Creative Commons founder.
I picked up on Dabble through Chuquet founder Laurence Timms’, blog. I’m sure Mary has the right formula because what she’s doing is steeped in the altruistic web.
The trick though is to inject the Dabble system with a set of values that orientates the tag/playlist strategy to the lesser mass audience. Media on the web right now is dominated by the headline video sites (YouTube, ifilm, dailymotion) and by the user-generated idyll.
There are sites out there that have invested more in production values, story-telling, people discovery and issues, that the YouTube’s are drowning out.
It’ll be interesting to see how Dabble delivers to a variegated audience, or rather how many people with a fascination for concerned and purposeful media make the system work for them. The signs so far are good - Dabble has a requests page where already people are seeking fillm footage from members, film footage that seems to have an altruistic purpose.
Why altruism? Because the web’s moral purpose is upheld by sites where people give and take and, in the end, that’s what builds the case for socially useful rules like Net Neutrality. Obvious but it bears repeating.
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