connecting*the*dots

If you’re a blogger that watches TV not only for it’s unbelievably passive entertainment and programmed misinformation (heh), but to find video clips that just might reinforce your thesis in your next post, I’ve found a service that you need to keep on your radar.

My good friend, Jonathan Daniel, has been working diligently for the past few years as the VP of Product Development at Critical Mention. A few weeks ago he gave me a tour of their services, and a beta account to play with. Let me tell you, as a blogger, the functionality they’ve developed to date (and in the wings) completely blew me away.

From their web site:

Broadcast media is the number one force shaping public opinion and driving consumer decisions every day. Every company and organization with public relations, crisis management, investor relations, competitive intelligence and brand management initiatives must track critical mentions on broadcast TV in order to monitor public perception, respond to events and crises, and gather market intelligence.

In contrast to traditional broadcast monitoring services, Critical Mention employs technology to monitor broadcast television in real-time. Using Critical Mention’s CriticalTVSM search platform, customers can view their broadcast clips and transcripts within seconds of airing.

Yeah, you read that correctly: Instantaneous transcripts AND broadcast clips. Drooling yet?

CM’s service uses the practically ubiquitous implementation of closed-captioned satellite feeds as a source for full-text searches. The instant digitizing of each broadcast to their servers allows for instantaneous clipping of video surrounding the term or phrase being searched.

While the interface design is somewhat clunky, the functionality is superb. The above image shows the result of a search for the term “blogging.” As you roll over the results on the right, a vid-cap puppets on the left with the transcript of the one minute clip and the highlighted search query. Found a broadcast that you’d like to use? Simply click on the expand button to expand the clip to display up to seven, one-minute clips that surround the queried term.

Once expanded, the current version allows the user to save the selected clips to a working library, send an email of the video and transcript or order hard copies — very smart and useful services for CM’s current business model.

CM gained financing and grew over the last few years by partnering with broadcasters to enable partnered companies to track mentions of products, services, employees, intellectual property, etc. across the airwaves.

To a number of bloggers, this concept might sound very familiar.

Back in November, Daniel Lyons (Forbes.com) espoused a similar position on media monitoring, except Lyons’ position was steeped in venom, advising corporations to explicitly track posts from bloggers. Once published, he immediately drew the ire of bloggers for his ridiculous and stereotypical assertions of blogging in general and for his positioning of such monitoring as Fighting Back.

The customer conversation isn’t one to fight, it’s one to join.

So how can this proprietary service add to the richness of blogging? The advent of YouTube — with their free, unlimited storage of video and automatic generation of code that enables bloggers to present in-line video — has prepped the web publishing market for Critical Mention to open up their service model outside the walls of partnered corporations.

A few examples of how a professional / public version of CM might be used:

• An analyst site, such as TheStreet.com (disclosure: I’m consulting on the current redesign), could present inline media coverage of companies and news events to fortify the context of their assertions
• Media Matters, a conservative misinformation analyst site, would be able to greatly reduce their investment in tracking staff and hardware
• Blogumentaries, such as The War Tapes and The Echo Chamber Project could gather and post media clips as research and/or extensions to their narrative thesis
• Bloggers in general would go gonzo for such access to media clippings, as the service would replace the time consuming tasks of manually recording programs or scouring the internet for the chance of discovering a timely, linkable/postable file.

The usefulness of the service is practically endless and the various business models are just waiting to be developed.

In the realm of unbundled content, each re-post of video content is actually a form of advertising for both the original broadcast and the broadcasting network. Once a value proposition has been quantified by CM, I’d imagine that forward-thinking broadcasting ownership would be gung-ho to participate in such a far-reaching, viral broadcast model.

CM could then serve as the middle man, establishing both a professional fee-based service level and a free public blogging service level.

This service could truly “2.0″ media in one swooping move.