I’m a smartass

Don’t you hate people that  keep saying “I saw that one coming” or “I told you so”? I hate even more when I see people saying stuff i said before, and better than I did. But it’s comforting to know that sometimes a crazy idea is not that crazy at all.

In one of Google Reader items I saw the presentation of a new video tool:

Interactive video transcription and captioning service 3Play Media has an answer with a video clipping feature it announced today that “allows users to quickly create and share specific portions of a video simply by highlighting the spoken words in the transcript.”

Rather than introducing a video by asking your friends to use somewhat inaccurate controls to skip ahead, the service helps take them directly to the part of the video you intend, right down to the specific word. The service creates a link that includes start- and stop-time information. When you click on the link, you’re taken to a page that shows not only the video, but a word for word transcription alongside it.

This reminded me of one of those crazy ideas I sometimes have. In January this year I wrote:

I hate to transcribe every single word from an audio recording, and I’m also really slow taking notes. So, what about some voice recognition magic, that would  get every little word out to text format, while recording the audio, and the timeline for editing that audio would be words themselves. Not getting  it? You’d edit the statements like a Word doc, but if you chose a paragraph you’d have the audio associated to that specific bit ready to export. And send it immediately for publishing.

Not exactly the same idea, but pretty much the same principle. If 3Play Media tweaked the code a bit I think they could do what I proposed.

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Alex Gamela é jornalista freelancer e um pensador sobre os novos media, e é Mestre em Jornalismo Online, na Birmingham City University. É o autor do reputado blog The Lake | O Lago, dedicado à evolução e ao futuro do Jornalismo. Este é a continuação do trabalho iniciado aí.