i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Can't believe I didn't know about this site before: http://metavid.org/wiki/

It allows you to search video of members' speeches before Congress with some interesting features. In addition to searching by keyword (I think through transcripts, which are provided by Congress), date, speaker, category (setting off 202 alarms), bill name/number, there are also some featured semantic queries.

Seems the basis for this site, the MetaVid project, was originally an MFA thesis project at UCSC, to keep it in the UC family. The software and technology (for more, see http://metavid.org/w/index.php/about) quickly gets far beyond my comprehension level, but looks like other iSchoolers could have some use for / interest in. Lot of FLOSS, of course.

Suppose one general question even the non-technical people could ponder is: what is the added value of having the video, rather than the transcripts? How do you find the search interface, and the categories, which are suggested by users? The "video game metaphor" category looks promising.