How Cool is Coull.tv?

Today's Web user depends on search - well, I do, at least. But search/Google is really only doing words. And, as any fule kno, words is easy. Now video, that's quite a different matter.

So the appearance of any site claiming to make videos searchable is at least worth a look, so to speak. Coull.tv is one such:

coull.tv enables you to activate objects within a video - making people, objects and other items clickable. Anybody can then add tags and comments describing the video and or the objects in that video. This enables the video or parts of it to be easily found; the more popular tags and comments become, the more often coull.tv will suggest them in related searches. coull.tv will use the power of the community to help categorize and tag every element of a video. coull.tv has no pre-roll or post-roll advertising in the way of the viewing experience.

There are two important elements here. First, the fact that elements within a video can be demarcated and made clickable. But that on its own doesn't make a search engine: it just turns video flow into discrete elements. The second part of the coull.tv equation is to get users to do the difficult bit: indexing all those elements. In fact, this is probably the only way video indexing is going to be done for a long while. Automatic recognition through some kind of AI is just too difficult currently.

God knows, the last thing we need is another video sharing site; happily, coull.tv seems to be searching for something more. (Via John Battelle's Searchblog.)