Friday, May 13, 2011

Trends in Unlocking Video Submissions

There has been a lot of chatter lately about the "next big thing" in internet trends. Two of the biggest are the surge in mobile devices leading to GPS-driven apps and functions, and also a movement to introduce "gaming" into a lot of internet projects. Both of these themes appeared in many of the submissions in the Knight Mozilla Unlocking Video Challenge.

My own submission, for example, involved mapping crowdsourced video. Many of the other participants produced a similar plan involving geo-location. Considering the proliferation of GPS devices, especially in mobile phones, images and videos tagged with an exact location can easily be plotted on maps thanks to open APIs like Google Maps or OpenStreetMap. Using the crowd to collect images, and then sharing their specific location is a practice already in use, but will clearly be a staple in online journalism moving forward. Collecting and sorting this video is clearly the challenge.

Many of the projects also suggested gaming or badging. Adding a gaming element can be as simple as distributing points for a submission, awarding badges or making any sort of task into a competition. Foursquare is an example of an application that awards points and badges for location-based challenges. The more you check in, the more points you get, and the more badges you unlock. Like any game, whoever has the most points is the winner... or at least winning, as these games are often ongoing.

A lot of submissions thought that offering challenges (or assignments) and offering points or badges would inspire citizen journalists to submit their video to news sites. I can see this being an effective method to source content because it's essentially the model behind every thriving online community. Each online group has a higherarchy, whether its explicitly stated or not. Some might count your forum posts, or wiki edits, or the number of Twitter followers, but regardless of the kind of "points," people who are enthusiastic about participating in an online community always want more and therefore, particpate more. When online communities already function on an unwritten points system, creating a structured reward system just plays on a model that already exists.

These two trends come from very different places. GPS tracking for video is a technology that has become available to the masses in recent years in the latest mobile phones. Gaming just preys on the human desire to compete, collect, and win. One is a technological advancement, the other, a psychological factor that has influenced humans for millenia.

It is no shock to me that these two trends kept surfacing. I would have argued they're two of the driving forces behind the current generation of the internet, along with open technologies and mobile applications. I expect to see these themes pop up again and again in the rest of the challenges.

No comments: