Thursday, August 10, 2006

AOL and Blinkx Team for the Kids

It's probably not the best time (see below) for AOL to launch a search service aimed at school kids, but it happened. AOL partnered with video search engine Blinkx for a multimedia search service that can specify the grade level of the content being searched. Ah, to be a kid again.

Although you don't here as much about them, Blinkx is assembling the most robust set of international content partners for professional video as well as launching a large stable of user-generated video including its own channels, SelfCastTV (U.K.) and Garage Video (U.S.).

The two biggest challenges for video search engines are making money, and because the archives are getting so big, personalization. It is overwhelming to search millions of videos, especially when the content tagging is very rudimentary. Blinkx has an advertising channel that only boasts a few searches, but letting users rank the ads is smart, and should be incorporated into the ad networks' delivery analytics.

While Blinkx has allows users to customize RSS feeds, they should create some default channels that help to navigate their content. For example, a news channel could organize the best of the breaking stories for those who like to view rather than read news. Add in Digg-still ratings, and voila, a new ad-supported video service.

Posted By John Gartner at 12:13 PM
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