the onda

According to TechCrunch, YouTube has just released a URL extension that allows people to send around links not just to videos but to particular time codes within the video. This is a small feature but a big deal because it will allow for more fine-grained addressing into the relatively "un-webby" media format of video which I think of as the speed bump of modern web-based information consumption: click, scan, scroll, click, scan, video— crap! (five minutes later you realize you didn't really care to see that useless video review of the G1 because it never addressed the battery life issue you were researching).

Of course Jon Udell was writing about this stuff years ago; realizing that linearly consumed media needed finer addressability, he implemented a kludgey solution for audio transcripts that even worked. YouTube doing this though will hopefully set a new de-facto standard (are you listening Hulu?) and make video consumption online even more webby.

By the way, I think the next great contextualizing descendants of the recently popped Web 2.0 bubble may emerge from taking this notion of making traditionally un-bookmarkable objects bookmarkable in much the same way that YouTube did for television, and thinking along this access of finer and finer addressability is not a bad way to start. SMS bookmarking? Transaction bookmarking? Traffic bookmarking? It's all part of that wonderful emerging shared data cloud of ours!