Sunday, September 27, 2009

Semantic media retrieval service? please?

Here is an application of semantic Web technologies that I would like to have. Please make it for me so that I don't have to. When I finish writing this post,
  1. I would like to press a button that said "Enhance?".
  2. When I pressed the button, the application would read through the text and identify terms, phrases, or other conceptual nuggets that it 'understood'.
  3. These concept nuggets would then be used to find stock / open access images (and videos, etc.)
  4. Where a likely candidate set of images was identified, they would be displayed such that I could quickly choose which, if any, that I liked
  5. When I agreed to keep one, it would be embedded in a reasonable location in the text and I would very rapidly go on with my life, but with the added joy of having authored a much more entertaining piece of online personal history.
This thought crept into my mind after reading through Joey de Villa's post about joining Microsoft which is shot full with entertaining media enhancements to the text - which likely took a non-insignificant amount of time for him or his team of personal assistants to put together.

Pictures are indeed worth many words, but how many $$$'s? Perhaps you might even be able to make money with such an app by using it to sneakily sell professional photos and other content.

While you are at it, could you please provide the same text-to-media service in a non-embedded application so that when I needed a clever portrayal of a concept like 'failure', 'success', or 'mass collaboration', for a presentation I could quickly look one up. I might even be willing to by it if the content was good and the price was reasonable -> in a world where I could almost certainly find what I needed by spending a little more of my own valuable time looking for it.

2 comments:

Stew said...

Doesn't Zemanta do something like this? I've never actually used it but supposedly it picks photos for you...

Benjamin Good said...

Yes, it looks like it does pretty much exactly this ;).
thanks!