Additionally, as I found through my article for PBS Mediashift, video search/browsing continues to be several years behind text search. That’s what I heard from many folks doing video news archives in academia, footage houses, and the new “2.0″ search facilities.

The best bet for searching video is AOL’s Truveo, but for some reason, CBS is not making Sunday Morning episodes available online, and Truveo doesn’t have it from any other source.

I’ve done enough legwork on this. You and Mr. Zollman are interactive media professionals. You likely have more time than I do to track down somebody at CBS. Don’t even mention “the conversation.” Just say you are trying to track down a video clip of theirs, you’d like to see if it is available online– and, if not, why; if so– what would it cost to watch it.

As per “the conversation.” The NYT has had seamless links to the archive for 2+ years now. You claim that they only “joined the conversation” 3 months ago with the end of TimesSelect. But this is pure myth. As I demonstrated in my research series, people were linking to the NYT in great numbers over those two years.

It appears that you argue here that freeing the Op-Ed writers represented a change in the conversation. But in your book, you wrote: “Notice I did not say abandon paid registration, in fact, I support it.”

Either you are not being consistent with what you wrote, or you didn’t really articulate well what you were trying to say on this in The Search.

Three weeks ago I sent you my response to this section of your book. I did plenty of legwork here, providing a list for you of the Google News ranking algorithm, explaining some of the data uncovered by NewsKnife, etc. I think that sending this presentation of information would be valuable to your readers.

I wrote a 2,200-word article for PBS MediaShift last August examining why it is so much more difficult to search through video news archives than it is to to search through print/online news archives.

It has less to do with “the Conversation” than it does with “the Search.” As you are looking to update your book, this research effort should be another important addition to it.

Jon

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Interesting — they appear to be most interested in “gut reactions”, “knee-jerk responses”, etc.