It’s called WatchKnowLearn.org and it’s being developed for K-12 students and educators.

While I don’t fit directly into either of those categories I like to think of myself as a “lifelong learner” and for that reason WatchKnowLearn has become an essential reference tool for me, perfect for a quick knowledge “tune-up,” learning about something new, or even for a bit of reminiscing about my days watching Saturday morning cartoons (remember when cartoons weren’t 24/7?) with a animated version of a well-known fable.

The Content

WatchKnowLearn includes information and direct links about more than 32,000 “educational” videos from disparate sources around the web. The selection and curation is done by editors, many of them educators and education professionals like school librarians. WatchKnowLearn also has a media review panel consisting of several hundred members.

With so much video material out there (and much more to come), the focus at WatchKnowLearn is quality over quantity. Having experts reviewing and adding metadata to each entry is not only useful especially when it comes to educational material but also a major time saver.

Searching & Browsing

Searching the database is simple, as you might expect it to be. Since all videos include appropriate age-specific metadata you can limit your search from the outset for kids of a particular age using a slider found to the left of any search box.

All entries also include subject info that is hyperlinked so you can quickly review other videos within that subject.

While searching works well, for me the browse tool is not only useful but also makes discovery fun. Score one for serendipity.

The directory is organized hierarchically with top-level subjects including mathematics, language arts and life skills. Selecting any of them reveals many subcategories.

A Bit Of WatchKnowLearn History

Jimmy Wales is the well-known co-founder and face of Wikipedia. The force behind WatchKnowLearn happens to be the lesser-heralded co-founder of Wikipedia, Dr. Larry Sanger (he left the project several years ago). He also founded another crowd-sourced encyclopedia project, Citizendium. Dr. Sanger has led the development of WatchKnowLearn from about 2007-2010. Funding comes from the Community Foundation of Northwest Mississippi.

WatchKnowLearn’s advisory board also includes influential Harvard scholars Lawrence Lessig and Chris Dede, among other notables. As you can see—this is a serious resource for online learning.

A Few More Facts About WatchKnowLearn

• Most videos in English but Spanish and Chinese language interfaces are being developed and are now accessible on the site.
• Educators can create “ classrooms” to help organize video collections specifically related to the needs of their students.
• Nearly 16 million videos have been viewed via the WatchKnowLearn database.

Now, go forth and explore WatchKnowLearn and make sure to share this valuable learning resource with friends, family and colleagues.

You can also keep up to date with new developments at WatchKnowLearn News via Twitter and Facebook.

Without further ado, here are the first four (of many more to come).

C-SPAN Video Library

• Cost: free
• In three words, amazing, important, essential
• With a few exceptions just about every program that have aired on C-SPAN, C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN3
• More than 170,000 hours of content, back to 1987
• Advanced search interface
• Important to remember that C-SPAN carries more than what goes on in the Senate and House of Representatives
• Hours and hours of author interviews, political rallies, interviews with newsmakers and journalists and much more
• Most programs are full text searchable using mechanically generated transcripts
• People search allows you to quickly see if a person has appeared on the network and then link directly to the program(s)
• Example: Larry Page (he’s appeared on C-SPAN Twice)
• Many programs are embeddable
• Most programs appear in the archive within a day or two (if not sooner) of airing.
• The C-SPAN Video Library won a prestigious Peabody Award in June

Old Maps Online

• Cost: free
• Officially launched last week
• One search, centralized access to multiple digitized historical map collections
• About 60,000 maps available today, with more than 120,000 maps by end of 2012
• Keyword search, focus by date using slider, search by map
• Material included so far:
  • A Vision of Britain through Time, Historical Map Library
  • British Library, Map Library
  • David Rumsey Map Collection
  • Moravian Library, Mollova mapová sbírka

Archive-It

• Cost: free to search; fee for institutions to subscribe
• Archive-It is a fee-based service from the Internet Archive that works with non-profits, schools, governments and others to crawl and archive sites and pages they specify
• Many of the collections are available to all
• Close to 1,700 collections currently available
• Example: Archive of NASA Social Media
• Collections are updated regularly with new material
• Unlike the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, Archive-It collections are keyword searchable

Road 2.0: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions

• Cost: free
• Provided by Duke University Libraries
• More than 30,000 digitized images, with search/browse capability
• Most images are of outdoor signs from between 1930s and 1980s
• Advanced interface allows you to search by company, product and date

1. High level site previews in search results
2. A multimedia search within a site function
3. A social layer which, among other things, allows Volunia users to share information and connect to one another

My sense is that it is the social layer which will be most appreciated by Volunia users. Let’s look at each.

Volunia Search Result Previews Offer A “Fly-Over” Site View

During his launch presentation, (in Italian, starts at 40 minute mark) Volunia founder Massimo Marchiori described search users as similar to chickens, trapped in cages and incapable of flying.

Users have been forced to choose search results by consulting one of those classic 10 item title, summary and link lists for too long. Wouldn’t it be nice if users were freed from their cages, and not only, were actually able to fly over a site, viewing a visual or a grid map, before committing to visit it?

Volunia, perhaps from volare, to fly, offers two types of high level site map previews, potentially freeing users from commitment tyranny. The first type, a visual map, aims to group areas of a site together in neighborhoods.

Figure 1: Volunia search result site fly-over: visual map

The second site preview map is in the form of a grid, reminiscent of computer folders. The expectation is that this format will be more useful to people searching from devices with small displays, like smartphones.

Figure 2: Volunia search result site fly-over: grid map

Interactive drill-down versions of the maps are also available from a Volunia menu bar which is visible while navigating a site. Site owners can improve the maps using a Volunia provided sitemap editor.

Figure 3: Volunia sitemap editor

Result previews aren’t exactly a new concept – Ask.com introduced their binoculars feature in 2004.

Where Volunia differs is in their choice to show a site map preview instead of a page preview. Many searches are indeed navigational in nature, one reason Google provides their sitelinks for some queries.

Volunia may be on to something.

Volunia Wants To Surface Multimedia Otherwise Hidden In A Site

Initially the primary focus in Web search was on textual documents, particularly the html kind, rich in semantic structure with their glorious title, heading and paragraph tags.

Oh, I didn’t mention the links between documents, did I? Other Web content formats, from PDF files to images and then video posed much greater obstacles to search engine indexing for a number of reasons.

Today, major search engines like Google offer navigation links to enable a user to search just images or video.

Ambitious searchers can usually find an advanced search syntax page which allows them to limit their searches to specific sites and file types, but for the most part major search engines have taken the “don’t make me think” approach, providing searchers with a blend of media types in search results, what Google calls universal search.

Volunia on the other hand wants to make it easy for a user to discover the multimedia richness hidden in sites like NASA by providing a very visible multimedia site search filter.

Figure 4: Volunia's multimedia search filter

The Web Has Come Alive, Says Volunia: Volunia’s Social Layer

It isn’t immediately clear how useful this feature will prove to be: after all, even if we want to follow the “wisdom of the crowd”, there’s no way to know if the site’s current visitors from Volunia are actually happy with their choice, nor would it be clear to what extent one searcher’s expectations for a page align with those already visiting that page.

The same visitor counts are also available as layers on the site navigation maps.

Seek & Meet: Interact With Other Volunia Users

What might arguably be Volunia’s greatest innovation is in letting fellow search travelers to a page interact with each other, what Volunia calls seek and meet, a feature which feels very reminiscent of Google’s now closed Sidewiki, albeit with two key differences. The first is that users can interact in realtime.

Figure 6: Volunia seek and meet interactive site chat

This birds of a feather real time information sharing might prove useful in a number of situations where people are looking for pre- and post- purchase information.

In the pre-purchase phase, a searcher might want to interact with other users to better understand the product or service they’re considering, not to mention to discover what alternatives others are considering.

Sometimes, it’s nice just to have confirmation that we’re making the right choice. In the post-purchase phase, searchers might be able to resolve support issues by consulting with other searchers – potentially reducing a company’s support costs while providing interactive peer to peer support 24 hours a day.

Each Volunia user is able to fill in a personal profile, much like any social network. The matchmaking possibilities are clearly endless, but I suspect it would be best if I don’t go there….

It isn’t rare to see glowing online reviews written by someone with a connection to a product or service, and equally harsh reviews from competitors or ex-employees with an ax to grind. It doesn’t take much to imagine people attempting to scam the system by introducing fake search users to interact with other searchers.

It remains to be seen if “seek and meet” really is something people will take to. Real time search collaboration will well depend on a critical mass of socially oriented searchers congregating on the same sites at the same time, no easy feat for a niche search engine.

Site owners will undoubtedly be pleased with the second apparent difference to Google’s Sidewiki: commenting can be disabled if desired, something Google didn’t allow.

Volunia, The Company, And A Few Volunia Tidbits

According to data published by Italian business paper Il Sole 24 Ore, Volunia was founded in 2008 by Massimo Marchiori and entrepreneur Mariano Pireddu, with Pireddu providing €2 million in funding to date. You might not immediately recognize Massimo Marchiori’s name, yet as an academic Massimo has been working on the theoretical issues of Web search for years.

His seminal 1997 paper, The Quest for Correct Information on the Web: Hyper Search Engines, would serve as one of the sources of inspiration for two Stanford students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who would acknowledge Marchiori’s contribution to their own work, Google.

During Volunia’s beta phase, over 100,000 people are being invited to become “power user” beta testers. The Volunia user interface is in 12 languages but Marchiori said during the launch presentation that the actual index coverage isn’t limited to those languages.

The Volunia team has ideas for Volunia “extensions”, i.e. new functionality, which will be added to the core, the hard part which has already been done. Advertising will be added to the service.

Marchiori Says Social Needs To Emerge In Search

In an introductory video, Massimo notes that Volunia stems from an idea he’s harbored for several years, an idea for a “different perspective of what the search engine of the future should be”. In the Il Sole 24 Ore report Massimo said “The Web is a living place, there’s information, but there’s also people. The social dimension, already present, just needs to emerge”.

Bing, which started incorporating social signals from Facebook in 2010, and Google, which launched its social search in 2009, would probably both argue that the social dimension to search has already emerged. So would upstart blekko and to a lessor degree, the Russian Yandex.

Armani, Chianti, Ferrari… And Volunia

Volunia is based in Italy, not in Silicon Valley as one might have guessed. Italy actually has a history of search engine excellence. Google may well power most Italian portals today, but the talent behind a now defunct Italian search engine, Arianna, led Ask.com to locate its European R&D headquarters in Pisa.

The Reality Check: Search Isn’t Easy: Volunia Faces Many Challenges

The basic task of a search engine, finding, indexing and retrieving the world’s information, is a complex one. The size of the Web is immense. There’s the problem of searcher intent: we know what we’re looking for when we type a brief search query, but those few words are often open to multiple interpretations.

Google has conditioned searchers to expect lightning speed and mostly fresh and relevant results. Volunia will have to perform well on all these fronts and navigate thorny issues of privacy.

Many start-ups have nonetheless tried to compete with Google and Bing. Some, like Cuil, ran out of funding before gathering significant market share; others like blekko, with far greater funding, are still working hard to win over hearts and minds. Whether Volunia will be able to pull this off remains to be seen.

Kick The Volunia Tires Yourself!

Volunia has a sign-up form for those who want to try it out. Go kick the tires and support the underdog! From messages that I’ve seen on Friendfeed, Twitter and Facebook, very few have actually had a chance to actually use Volunia, credentials are only dribbling out, most likely in an attempt to avoid problems similar to what Google faced when they first opened Google Analytics to too many people at once. I based the considerations made (and images) in this article on demo videos released by Volunia in order to give you a preview of what to expect.

No matter how you look at the data, that’s a lot of eyeballs and a lot of time spent on a single site that a marketer can take advantage of. But creating a video is only half the battle; attracting viewers is the other half.

YouTube Promoted Video Ads operate similar to Google search ads and offer advertisers a way to draw attention to a video, gain viewers and channel subscribers, and eventually influence downstream conversions. Promoted Videos show up according to visitors’ search results either at the top or to the right of the page.

Promoted Videos in YouTube

Additionally, with a Promoted Videos account, marketers can add overlays to their videos and link directly to their site, offer a promotion, etc. Given the popularity of video and YouTube, here are a few suggestions to best take advantage to YouTube Promoted Videos.

Create The Complete Package

First and foremost, to maximize your presence on YouTube you need good, engaging videos (not just one) and a YouTube channel to showcase them. Just as important – maybe even more so – to the videos are the video titles and descriptions as these will be used by YouTube to match your video with visitors’ search queries.

Once you have a channel with several videos, monitor the feedback and if a video achieves a good response, then it’s time to invest in promoting it.

Like other Google ads, Promoted Videos are managed through AdWords and follow a similar format to paid search.

When creating the ad, it’s imperative the thumbnail of your video and ad-copy reflect the nature of your video so as to attract the right audience. Words and concepts related to your video(s) should be used in the ad. The words “official” or “original” in a headline tend to increase views.

Choose Keywords Wisely

YouTube visitors are looking just for video content; consequently, search habits differ from traditional search. Given the difference, simply porting over keywords from search or display campaigns won’t have the desired effect.

Keywords must relate to the video you’re promoting, and thus should be chosen independently. YouTube offers advertisers a keyword suggestion tool that provides recommendations based on your video description, video id/url, or target demographic (in beta).

The tool will also give you an idea of the monthly search volume for each keyword so you can see which keywords visitors tend to use more often and incorporate them appropriately.

Like paid search, you can select between broad, phrase, exact or negative match types.

YouTube's keyword suggestion tool

Bidding Time

When it comes to keyword bidding on YouTube, think of it just as you would for search or display campaigns. You’ll want to set a conversion goal and determine what your expected volume and budget will be each month. Naturally, you’ll want to determine the value of each click. A third party bidding tool, particularly one integrated with your other SEM campaigns, proves useful in managing your YouTube bidding decisions and assessing the results of your promotions.

Don’t Forget The Overlay

One of the primary perks of running Promoted Videos is the ability to include an overlay ad in your video that appears at the bottom of your video while it plays. The overlay allows you to link from your YouTube video to an external site and is an invaluable technique for driving viewers to your site and transitioning them from learning about your brand to purchasing.

Overlays within a YouTube video are a great way to drive viewers to your site

Engage Your Viewers

YouTube is a social network. As such, a video provides you an opportunity to interact with your target audience. A successful video doesn’t just get a view, but also elicits a response.

If viewers ask for a follow-up video be sure to provide one, and if your video is shared by viewers on other social sites, be sure to respond as well. Responding and participating in the conversation with viewers allows you to strengthen your brand and may provide insight on how to create better videos.

As online video continues to grow, a strong presence on YouTube will become all the more critical to your marketing efforts. What’s been your experience with YouTube and Promoted Videos?

Create A Brand Channel

Establishing a YouTube presence is the critical first step. Setting up a brand channel and getting it whitelisted will open up a host of customization possibilities, from custom background designs to the ability to add gadgets, like a booking widget.

Brand channels also open up a host of metrics via YouTube Insight, so you can measure engagement and success as well as conduct deeper analysis.

Then, of course, it’s time to add some videos, and preferably well-organized ones. Grouping videos into thematic playlists helps with video discovery for viewers and opens up the possibility of appearing as a playlist in YouTube search results.

I won’t go in depth on the myriad best practices for optimizing video descriptions and titles, but you can read more about all these SEO tactics and more on Search Engine Land’s Video Search area. In short, set up the best YouTube channel possible, with compelling and search engine optimized content.

Now that you have a fantastic library of video content sitting around, start promoting it to your website visitors, email subscribers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers and anyone else possible. Start growing viewers and subscribers for your YouTube channel; they will come in handy later.

Promoted Videos

Similar to AdWords’ paid search targeting, in-house marketers can set up campaigns for search-keyword-triggered promoted video placements on YouTube to appear in YouTube search results.

In addition, TrueView is YouTube’s rebranded instream video ad product. The basic model is to target a promotional instream video to appear on other relevant videos. Viewers can skip the video, but advertisers pay only when a minimum viewing threshold is met. A companion banner accompanies the instream ad as a call-to-action point.

Paying for promoted video has some ROI challenges since the video itself is not really a direct revenue driver, but it’s no more challenging than scenarios like paying for Facebook ads to grow fans, or promoted accounts and Tweets to grow Twitter followers. YouTube subscribers and viewers will have value; the key is testing and discovering what that value is for your organization.

Remarketing

Earlier in the article, I wrote that your YouTube channel viewers and subscribers will come in handy later, and that time is now. Start remarketing to them. Via the AdWords Audiences tab, in-house search engine marketers can set up a remarketing campaign for users who visited their YouTube brand channel.

Visitors to a YouTube channel are highly qualified customers, and many, having stumbled across videos while browsing or searching YouTube, will have never visited a channel’s associated website. Encourage them to stop by with remarketing ads. Check out more information on YouTube remarketing on YouTube’s blog.

Beyond YouTube: Video Ads & TV

There are a host of possibilities for in-house marketers to promote great video ad assets. Besides YouTube, there are Google video ads, Hulu and other online video streaming sponsorships, and most banner ad platforms support video assets. Leverage great performing video across channels!

With the rising popularity of online accessible entertainment, it seems like no one is watching television anymore. But still, it’s important to remember how many people still have cable in the USA — 104 million subscribers, according to the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, or about one third of the total U.S. population.

TV is still one of the biggest audiences out there for video, so taking some great video and making a low-budget TV ad to run via targeted Google television campaigns might be a great test for in-house marketers, and a great résumé addition.

While these ideas only encourage in-house marketers to look at establishing a basic YouTube video presence and paid promotional options, there’s even more in-house teams can consider with promoting video via social media channels, viral campaigns, integrating into websites and the overall SEO benefits of video for natural search!

Google, the owner of YouTube, is one of a handful of companies, including Yahoo, Amazon and DirectTV, that are rumored to be going after Hulu. The anticipated, competitive bidding could fetch as much as $2 billion for the site. Google purchased YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in an all-stock transaction.

Hulu would help Google in numerous ways. From an advertising standpoint its safer and more attractive to brands than YouTube. Hulu also provides broad access to premium content, which Google has begun to acquire.

If Google were the winner of the “Hulu auction,” despite the plethora of video destinations and ad networks you see above, it would likely face another round of intense regulatory scrutiny because the company would potentially own both the largest video site and the most successfully monetized.

YouTube remains the dominant video site online, but it’s built around user-generated, amateur videos. Hulu, on the other hand, has agreements with major TV networks that gives it access to current (and professional) programming — an area that YouTube has been trying to beef up for a few years now. That kind of programming is what attracts ad dollars, as the Times report explains:

Hulu’s rights to the current season’s TV shows have drawn interest from Google and Yahoo, in part because these popular programs have attracted more than 600 advertisers — including such major brands as McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson and Toyota. Indeed, the site expects to bring in $500 million in revenue this year from advertising and proceeds from its Hulu Plus subscription service.

According to the most recent comScore numbers, Hulu showed about 1.3 billion of the 4.6 billion total video ads displayed in May.

(ComScore’s numbers include streaming ads only, and don’t include ad overlays or banner ads — both of which are common to YouTube.)

Hulu was the 10th most popular video destination in May, according to comScore’s count of unique viewers. But it was second overall in minutes-per-viewer, behind only YouTube.

None of the companies mentioned provided a comment to the LA Times.

According to the latest comScore video stats, which cover February 2010, Google sites — i.e., primarily YouTube — saw a

• 2.1% drop in unique viewers
• 4.3% drop in viewing sessions
• 7.7% drop in minutes per viewer

But YouTube is still exponentially more popular than all the other sites on comScore’s list, including Microsoft, which rose from No. 7 in January to No. 2 in February.

Meanwhile, earlier this week a different research firm shared its statistics related specifically to movie streaming online. In an NPD Group report, Netflix dominates movie streaming similarly to how YouTube dominates general video watching.

NPD estimates that Netflix’s share of the online movie market — downloaded or streamed — was 61% between January and February. That’s more than all of its competitors combined, including cable on-demand services from Comcast and Time Warner, DirecTV, Amazon, and Apple.

The new video search functions similarly to Topsy’s other search tools — web (links), tweets and photos. Results appear to be ranked based on several factors, including how often, how recent, and who shares the video on Twitter. The left column offers a number of filtering and sorting options.

Those search results are pretty good; I found a few Japan-related videos that I hadn’t seen yet despite having Twitter open all day the past two days.

Topsy isn’t the first real-time video search engine around. TweetMeme continues to offer video search, and OneRiot used to offer it, too. That was before OneRiot shut down its entire search engine and passed its search partners to … Topsy. Google doesn’t (yet) offer a video filter on its Realtime search, just one for images.

But, with many real-time search engines struggling and/or shutting down altogether (i.e., Collecta, CrowdEye, and others), Topsy may eventually become the default and even the last real-time search engine standing.

Clicker raised roughly $19 million from investors.

CBS also owns TV.com as well as several other online properties. How TV.com and Clicker co-exist and interact remains to be seen. TV.com is a portal. But Clicker has the potential to be the front end and directory for all digital media content, if Lanzone’s vision is realized. Recently Clicker integrated Facebook’s instant personalization for programming discovery and customized recommendations.

CBS will need to resist the temptation to reduce Clicker to a promotional vehicle for CBS shows and properties in particular.

Related Entries:

• Clicker CEO Jim Lanzone, Busting Internet TV Myths
• Clicker: More Than Just A Video Search Engine
• Clicker Launches iPhone App, Against Backdrop Of TV Changes
• “TV Guide For The Internet” Clicker Comes Out Of Beta