Online Video Suddenly Gets Brainy

David Kesmodel writes "Several online-video efforts are under way that offer a more cerebral alternative to the typical fare seen on the Web, the Wall Street Journal reports. The ambitious Fora.tv, for example, intends to establish relations with all of the lecture series from the nation's scores of think tanks, civic groups, bookstores and the like, and then put tapes of their speeches and panel discussions online in an easily searchable fashion."

It will be better than CSPAN book tv

[Anonymous Coward]

If by "better" you mean "more flash ads."

so...

[cosmocain]

those who actually ARE interested in the world's affairs get an easier method to feed their information hunger.

but i really don't believe that anoybody, who wouldn't watch news channels and use - maybe even international - websites to stay up-to-date with what's happening, will just because of a new possibility start to be interested. you can even find some informational stuff on youtube, but as long you are not interested in this kind of things, you'll still type in "boobs" instead of "global warming".

It would be nice if

[zappepcs]

some cable station actually created a news and info channel that performed as well as my use of the Internet for news? Seriously, a couple of hosts out front and a couple dozen web searchers, a few people coordinating the display of data... 30 minutes of the news Internet style without typing or clicking... hmmmmmm

No, I don't mean something stupid, but for every story I read about, I can quickly verify with a second or third source. When a new word or entity pops up I can hit Google or Wikipedia or other sites for reference quickly....

Well, not sure how it would work, but I wish news stations would take a clue from how the Internet is used.

TED

[DrWho520]

TED [ted.com]

Mediasite - 13,000 presentations

[BaumSquad]

There is already a great site for this type of smart content. YouTube for Braniacs, if you will. Check out Mediasite.com There are over 13,000 presentations available to peruse through, and even cooler, you can search within these presentations and it will find the words you search both in the OCR text of the supporting materials (powerpoint, doc cam, or whatever) and even within the spoken text! Really cool tech.

I am affiliated with the site, as I work for the manufacturer, Sonic Foundry, of the technology that creates the content that all of this is made from. But it's still way cool, and certainly the search tech is really cool, and it's really available, right now. Sweet.

Yet another niche search engine

[michaelmalak]

YouTube has plenty of this stuff already. It's just that YouTube's search facilities are a still immature. But not impossible. You can subscribe to "channels". You can click on your favorite authors and see what they've produced lately.

It's like all those niche search engines that were supposed to compete against Google. Yes, some people use them, but not as many as the niche search engine developers would have liked.

BTW, OT, my two favorite YouTube fictional series are:

1. AfterWorld [youtube.com]
2. We Need Girlfriends [youtube.com]