silly lip synching

[jrtom]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5628733099857233320

This is one of the funniest lip-synching dance videos I've seen...done by a couple of kids, one of which does a killer deadpan. (And reminds me of one of my sisters, a bit. :) )

Comments

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

That was pretty cute. thanks for sharing.

I was horrified by the tags people had added though, things like: "gay" and "losers." Come on people. It's kids being silly. Is there really a need to label them "faggots?"

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I noticed that. On the other hand, when I just checked now, the tags seem to have disappeared...either I'm looking in the wrong place now or Google is cleaning them up. (And if they are, I wonder how they're doing that.)

[pjack.livejournal.com]

(And if they are, I wonder how they're doing that.)

Magic internet gnomes?

Seriously, I have no idea how 95% of "The Internet" works the way it does. It might as well be magic gnomes. (They live in a series of tubes, doncha know.)

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Well, see, the thing is that this general kind of problem is something that it's not unreasonable for me to be able to figure out. Certainly I don't know jack about the physical layer of the Internet (at least not in any detail) but I do know, for example, the general shape of how Google ranks web pages.

I can think of a few ways that they could clean up abusive/incorrect tags; I just don't know which (if any) of them might be actually in use.

(0) Hire a bunch of magic gnomes (or low-paid Third World workers, or whatever) to review tags and delete those they don't like. Problem is that gnomes are expensive and low-paid Third World workers are not necessarily reliable--and the scale is a big problem.

(1) Periodically sweep the newly posted tags and remove those that are on their (hypothetical) Do Not Allow list. Easy, but censorship.

(2) After tags have had a chance to settle, remove those that have relatively few "votes". Also easy, but vulnerable to a concerted smear campaign.

(3) Establish reputations for individual taggers and remove those tags which are posted by individuals with low reputations in that context. This is hard (and subject to definitional problems, and may require additional metatagging that isn't apparent here) but possibly the most robust solution if you can get it to work at all.

(4) Write software that analyzes the content of the video and, based on some kind of knowledge of how well-intentioned humans sans agendas tag things, figures out how to tag the videos. This is (not surprisingly) a damned hard problem.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

I'm betting on 1. A complaints process or 2. a do not allow list, or even a program that flags potentially inappropriate tagging for review. You could have it list all things with "faggot" in the tag for example.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

A complaints process is plausible, except that I don't see an interface for it.

As a side point, apparently all the labels are currently disabled (at least I've checked a couple of random unrelated videos and none has any labels (and I can't add one)). So my original premise was mistaken. :P :) (That said, they still might plan to do one or more of the above.)