YouTube's Collaborative Annotations
Venue
Webcentives (2009), pp. 18-19
Publication Year
2009
Authors
Michael Fink, Sigalit Bar, Aviad Bazilai, Nir Kerem, Isaac Elias, Julian Frumar, Herb Ho, Ryan Junee, Simon Ratner, Jasson Schrock, Ran Tavory
BibTeX
Abstract
More and more YouTube videos no longer provide a passive viewing experience, but
rather entice the viewer to interact with the video by clicking on objects with
embedded links. These links are part of YouTube’s Annotations system, which enables
content owners to add active overlays on top of their videos. YouTube Annotation
overlays also enable adding dynamic speech bubbles and pop-ups which can function
as an ever-changing layer of supplementary information and entertainment,
augmenting the video experience. This paper addresses the question of whether the
ability to add annotation overlays on a given video should be opened to the YouTube
public. The basic dilemma in opening a video to collaborative annotations is
derived from the tension between the benefits of collaboration and the risks of
visual clutter and spam. We term the degree to which a video is open to external
contributions as the collaboration spectrum, and describe several models that let
content owners to explore this spectrum in order to find the optimal way to harness
the power of the masses.
